In just four months since ChatGPT entered the world, its grip on the future of work cant be overstated.
Its already attracted millions of users, been integrated into many businesses, and begun replacing job functionsand thats before OpenAI released its latest, smartest fourth generation of the artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT-4.
Yet there are still leaders and workers who remain equally skeptical and scared of the new tech.
In recruitment, some say its ridden with bias so will never match up to a hiring manager who has had the appropriate diversity training.
In the creative industries, some say it will never be able to write with the emotive capacity and flair of a human being.
Meanwhile, one CEO even told Fortune that clients and customers are so suspicious of it that it would lose him business.
Anybody thats doing something groundbreaking, is going to face that, says Evan Goldberg, the man behind the worlds first cloud software company, Oracle NetSuite.
People were once worried about what the cloud meant for the future
Looking back, Goldberg says that people reacted to the launch of cloud computing in a similar fashion to the mixture of frenzy, confusion, and denial we are witnessing as the world comes to terms with ChatGPT.
I went to a party at Larrys house [Larry Ellison, the business mogul, billionaire and co-founder of Oracle] and Steve Jobs walked up to me and said, Larrys really excited about this accounting in a browser thing. But does anyone want to do accounting in a browser? Goldberg recalls.
If Steve Jobs had skepticism, you can imagine the rest of the world did!
Goldberg claims he spent years convincing people that its probably better for [NetSuite] to professionally manage your information in a data center where you need a handprint to get in versus in a hard drive sitting on your desk that anyone can access. It seems obvious in retrospect, but it was pushing a very large boulder up a very steep hill.
Despite those initial fears, today most businesses and individuals use the cloud without a second thought whether its for file storage or for data security.
Goldbergs words of advice for new tech cynics
Indeed as ChatGPT enters the workforce, certain job functions may evolve and in some cases, cease to exist: Fortunes research into how CEOs are implementing ChatGPT found that content generation, research, and general administrative work is already being conducted by the chatbot across many businesses.
Theres no doubt theres potential dislocation coming, Goldberg agrees.
He suggests that leaders start thinking now about how they can use the bot in their business because soon you may be competing against other companies that have suddenly become more efficient by using it.
But dont panic.
Im still not rating the robocalypse very high on my list of risk factors, he shrugs.
Pointing to previous advancements like the inventions of the steam engine and the internetwhile they probably seemed like theyd have major consequences on workers and business at the timeGoldberg draws optimism from the fact that so far, none of these technologies have resulted in mass unemployment.
Human beings have found that they still have unique skills that are valuable, and have adapted.
