I’m basically lazy.
Probably one of the hazards of being a human.
It’s gotten to the point that when I want something other than food and don’t care much about the details, I open a browser to Amazon and click.
Thanks to Amazon, many very small, inexpensive objects improve my life. Without Amazon, the hours I would have needed to make a $5.00 purchase would have made it impossible. I would have just lived with it.
It has become increasingly difficult to do that as Amazon prioritizes sponsored products over good products. It’s almost as if I was using a search engine.
In the past couple of days, I find when I want answers, and I don’t care much about the details, I ask ChatGPT.
I have had a dumb issue with my MacBook for the past couple of years. ChatGPT told me that there was no directly supported and suggested a $7.00 commercial product.
I had a set of long-standing annoyances with some open-source software that I’ve been using for years. ChatGPT solved it (in a couple of tries). Probably given an hour or two of web searching, I could have solved them, but it was too much effort in order to find the couple of lines to type.
They’re fixed now.
ChatGPT makes my life better in the same way Amazon does. It took me more than three years to come to this point with Amazon. With ChatGPT, it took something under three weeks.
Perhaps not the grand vision of AI, but I foresee ten of billions of small improvements to hundreds of millions of lives.
Not too shabby.
