Welcome to the SpiritDAO newsletter, a community-created weekly column about applying our philosophy and practice to everyday life.
This weeks contributors: Ron Rivers
ChatPPP (Purpose, Productivity, and Pitfalls)
Over the past two weeks, I've become obsessed with GPT-4. Before the introduction of ChatGPT, I would have been considered a technical generalist, someone possessing an extensive range of technical and engineering talents, but with all of them needing more depth to qualify me as an engineer. While this has stayed the same as how I'd classify my skill set, it has closed an engineering knowledge gap that would have otherwise taken years, if not decades. Lately, I've been focusing on leveraging these large language models to generate code to automate the repetitive aspects of my productive efforts to free up more moments to focus on my purpose and passion. I've also been contemplating some of the pitfalls we need to avoid in order to maximize the shared benefits available to us.
If you still need to become familiar with ChatGPT, now (well, after you finish reading) would be an excellent time to stop what you're doing and begin to explore. It is a technology that almost immediately furthers our personal and collective powers. In combination with recent innovations such as end-to-end automation of the creation process, it provides entirely new outlets for automating the repetitive and maximizing our capacity to direct our focus and energy towards creative pursuits. In doing so, we better express our divinity in the moment, a core aspect of alignment with a relational universe governed by the single truth.
Now automating the repetitive has long been a goal of humanity. Still, our capacity to individually move these efforts forward presents entirely new challenges. For most people, the potential pitfalls are pretty straightforward, do you risk eliminating your sources of financial security and well-being by automating your day job? Let's take a hypothetical example where you are a salesperson, and eighty percent of your weekly workload focuses on emails. If you can automate this, you can claim that eight percent back for yourself, but how would your employer feel about that? Would they congratulate you on work well done or begin reconsidering your tenure as you've automated yourself out of a job? It's a risk we all understand from a macro perspective. Innovation changes the nature of work. At the same time, we have rarely had the power to direct these decisions ourselves. In the above example, value creation may pass a threshold where it presents risks that diminish our interest in experimenting.
The evolution of large language models redefines how we embrace purpose in relation to our productive efforts. These innovations empower a radical decentralization that greatly empowers individual and small group creations to break free from the institutions they were typically beholden. Unfortunately, this renaissance is presented on a backdrop of inhabiting rigid hierarchies of legal, economic, and political organization that provide no means or method of transition, only futile attempts to grasp what was. This speaks to a larger struggle in advancing our shared purpose, the dogmas we embrace around what has been to inform what is. To this end, humanity's most powerful creation is stifled from the onset.
In many ways, this simple example highlights a significant tension between profit-maximizing legacy institutions and those that will replace them. If the maximization of productivity via automation risks destitution for the creator, the organization and its inhabitants suffer. Leaders would be wise to recognize that the barrier is not only standard practice but ambiguity. Lack of clarity only furthers individual doubt and advances inaction and complacency as the path of least resistance.
Pluralistic organizations will seek to maximize shared prosperity by automating our productive efforts to most fully accelerate the spread of their values and vision. Integrating these tools and technologies in their efforts, centering them within community culture and creation. We are at the foot of a mountain, looking up. The only question remains which of us will embrace the most advanced tools to support our climb?
Auto-GPT
Auto-GPT is an experimental open-source application showcasing the capabilities of the GPT-4 language model. Explored in the above article, it has a quickly growing community and can support both GPT-4 and 3.5 depending on your API access. You can imagine it as enabling GPT-4 to talk to itself to problem solve, which can either be autonomous or user-guided.
While a final plan is yet to be ratified formally by our community, it is likely SpiritDAO will be leveraging member training as part of our onboarding process.
Github: https://github.com/Torantulino/Auto-GPT
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