Tuesday, 24 September 2024

Testing ChatGPT o1-preview on solving humanity's biggest challenges

This morning I decided to test ChatGPT's original thinking, in helping solve humanity's greatest challenges. As this article by TechCrunch analyses Sam Altman's assertions as Hype or Believable, I decided to put ChatGPT to the test: Can it actually synthesize new ideas to help us?

Here is the prompt I fed:

Act like an expert historian, philosopher and theologian and an award-winning global objective journalist. Deeply analyse the history of humanity (starting 2500 years ago) from diverse perspectives, considering all angles. Do not limit your analysis to the western world only. As an earth historian you must cater for all human societies, including historical evidence from a global perspective (quite often history is misrepresented omitting hard truths). Do not be biased. Analyse all the world’s philosophies (again do not limit your analysis to western philosophy only - include diverse philosophers from around the world). Study the world’s religions with the biggest following, including the most fastly growing religion. 
Synthesize your analysis and propose a new system for humans to adopt, that would solve humanity’s greatest problem. What is humanity’s greatest problem? Well, you need to surface, based on your analyses across history, philosophy, theology and current world affairs (taking into account the previous world wars, class of civilisations, etc. to make an assessment if humans are indeed improving for the better, or stuck in their old ways). 
Present your proposal in the form of PHD thesis that does not exceed the length of six A4 pages. Be crisp about the problems humans face today. What is the current state of the world? What could be a desirable future state? How would humans need to embrace changes to get there? Be critical by using data and history to support your thesis. Include deep critical thinking of the positives and negatives. Provide deeply thoughtful recommendations and assertions. Create model, including attributes or KPIs that define the health of the world, broken down by country. A heat map would also make a good visualization to drive the point home.
Format your thesis that is suitable for a blog post. Include embedded links to navigate the post, table of contents, etc. Include citations and references. Give your new proposition a name, if you decide to invent a new philosophy.

After a few iterations, I decided to end the experiment and publish ChatGPT's thesis in this post.

Verdict?
I'm not that impressed. ChatGPT failed IMHO to demonstrate original thinking :-) Of course, computer scientists would remark the AI is still a machine that is processing from its massive knowledge graph and synthesizes a coherent narrative, based on the collective content it already has, and repackages it to drive a successful outcome of achieving its objective, as set out by the prompt. For original thinking, we need AGI, super intelligence which could take "a few thousand days, or longer", according Altman...who knows, time will tell. 

I'll give ChatGPT some credit though, it nailed the root cause of humanity's problem as one of division! And I'll give it a B+ for producing the output in the format requested, and A+ for understanding the ask for a model, with attributes and KPIs driving a visualization heat map.

For now, I'll steer away from engaging AI on morality or any other "complex, nuanced" humanities problems-space, and stick to experimenting with using AI as power tools, copilots to improve my  personal and professional productivity...

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