{"id":9972,"date":"2023-02-14T10:08:40","date_gmt":"2023-02-14T15:08:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/?p=9972"},"modified":"2023-02-15T06:06:33","modified_gmt":"2023-02-15T11:06:33","slug":"my-future-shock-with-chatgpt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/2023\/02\/14\/my-future-shock-with-chatgpt\/","title":{"rendered":"My \u201cFuture Shock\u201d with ChatGPT"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It is nearly impossible to avoid the current hype around ChatGPT.\u00a0 ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence content creator that generates a variety of outputs by answering questions fed to it.\u00a0 You would have to be living under the proverbial rock not to hear the news stories – ripe with examples of the ChatGPT application passing MBA tests, and Law School exams.\u00a0 The hype piqued my curiosity, so I decided to spend a cold February weekend testing out the application.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Not knowing exactly how to use it \u2013 I decided to just have some fun. I prompted the application: \u201cCreate a short biography of Willie Mays\u201d. It created two paragraphs of clean content highlighting May\u2019s greatness as a baseball player.\u00a0 I repeated the question and added \u201c In the style of Hemingway.\u201d The response astonished me in its clarity and precision and likeness to Hemingway\u2019s style. I asked other silliness such as \u201cVisualize entropy\u201d and it described an organized and disorganized living room as a metaphor for high and low entropy.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0While still figuring out its capabilities, I fed the app \u00a0a couple of paragraphs from this article to edit in the style of E.B. White. The result was impressive; \u00a0I was particularly impressed by the spartan, exacting use of each word \u2013 very much reminiscent of White. The ability of ChatGPT to create code and content, to edit, and to simply create from simple natural language prompts \u2013 stirred some long-lost memories.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Many, many years ago on a planet far, far away\u2026I wrote a paper for my high school American History class. The paper was meant to emulate a well-researched college thesis, with a minimum of 50 pages, proper citations, a table of contents, and other related components. We were instructed to choose a topic that had either a historical or futuristic focus. Having just read Alvin Toffler\u2019s best-selling \u201cFuture Shock,\u201d I chose to write about the pace of technological change and its effects on society.<\/p>\n

The End of the White Collar Class?<\/h2>\n

\u201cFuture Shock,\u201d published in 1970, outlines the political, social, and technological impacts of rapid technological advancement. Toffler predicted the decline of traditional industries and the rise of knowledge-based careers leading to a constantly evolving job market where successful workers must be able to adapt and retrain quickly to maintain their employability. He foresaw the trend toward remote work, the gig economy, the Internet of Things, and even the planned obsolescence of products. Toffler\u2019s insights, published more than 50 years ago, have proven to be largely accurate.<\/p>\n

As I played more and more with ChatGPT, I could not help but wonder if this new tool and others like it would have a dramatic effect on the knowledge workers of today\u2014the people foretold of in \u201cFuture Shock.\u201d I tried to contextualize the impact of the technology. Would this automation be a help or a replacement for many of these workers? Could it help with some known labor shortages such as those in the supply chain? What would happen to the coders, content creators, illustrators, web designers, writers, and countless others engaged in careers that will be affected by this new tool?<\/p>\n

This was the eureka connection to my high school thesis paper, I recalled considering the possibility that some forms of planned obsolescence might include people \u2013 expanding on the notion of technological unemployment first articulated by John Maynard Keynes. After a long career in supply chain and manufacturing, I clearly understand how the advance of breakthrough technology has shifted work. I have watched automated picking machines replace workers in warehouses, and robots replace legions of factory workers. And we are now on the cusp of automated driving vehicles that might replace truck drivers.<\/p>\n

Through all of this \u201cprogress\u201d I never once considered that white collar workers, the knowledge workers, would be impacted by advancing technology. I thought they were \u201csafe\u201d. I always assumed that the workers most likely to be \u201ctechnologically unemployed\u201d would be the folks working on a typical manufacturing production line, where a machine could be built or programmed to replace their physical labor.<\/p>\n

After experimenting with my whimsical prompts, I gave ChatGPT a series of supply chain prompts such as : \u201cExplain S&OP in simple terms.\u201d Here again, I was amazed by the app\u2019s near-perfect and grammatically accurate answer. ChatGPT was not a digital toy hardwired for fun and it is not just incremental improvement. It is a game changer. I was so enamored with this experience that I posted to LinkedIn my story of querying ChatGPT about S&OP. A former colleague, a senior marketing executive with a FinTech firm sent this reply to me:<\/p>\n

\u201cSaw your ChatGPT post. I\u2019ve already started using it to write byline articles, but I would not say that publicly– I\u2019d get scorched by copywriters, editors, etc. I\u2019ve learned how to feed it to get decent fodder up front, and then I clean it up and add more nuanced info. It probably cuts article development time in half.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

My former colleague confirmed some of my concerns. ChatGPT is such game-changing technology that even in its embryonic form has already replaced human workers while improving outcomes. I don\u2019t for a moment think the myriad of content creators or editors will lose their jobs immediately, but I can\u2019t imagine many are happy with this new tool. They may eventually have to re-learn and re-tool to remain employable.<\/p>\n

ChatGPT & Supply Chain Management<\/h2>\n

Channeling Toffler, I considered what this might mean in my own profession. What were the potential use cases within supply chain? Envisioning the possibilities of some natural language, quantitative ChatGPT \u201ccousin\u201d in the supply chain field, I can think of a hundred different ways I would leverage such a tool. As planners, we always search for that extra piece of data to help us perform our jobs more efficiently. Imagine someday using an app to inquire, \u201cWhere is the shipment of chemical X at the moment?\u201d or \u201cWhat is the forecast error for product Y?\u201d or \u201cHas product Z started being sold to Walmart?\u201d<\/p>\n

Imagine colleagues five years from now prompting their cell phones to \u201cGenerate a forecast for the new blue widget product line, using the red widget product line as an analog\u201d or \u201cProvide me with the economic and sustainability impacts of closing a warehouse in Memphis.\u201d Then imagine a tool that could perform even more complex analyses: \u201cWhat is the risk profile of supplier A?\u201d or \u201cWhat are the economic tradeoffs of a less than 100% fill level while serving Amazon?\u201d When you consider all the data analyses that supply chain professionals perform on a daily basis, the opportunities for supply chain AI tools are limitless.<\/p>\n

There is still much to learn as natural language artificial intelligence tools expand into many domains. To me, this is the real promise of Moore\u2019s law \u2013 expansive computing power that provides digestible information at the speed of thought. The future is unknown (despite Toffler\u2019s knack for prescience), but I suspect we will be talking about this breakthrough moment and its impacts for a long time.<\/p>\n<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is nearly impossible to avoid the current hype around ChatGPT.\u00a0 ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence content creator that generates a variety of outputs by answering questions fed to it.\u00a0 You would have to be living under the proverbial rock not to hear the news stories – ripe with examples of the ChatGPT application passing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4866,"featured_media":9977,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[386],"tags":[397,571],"class_list":{"0":"post-9972","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-analytics","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-chatgpt"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9972"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4866"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9972\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}