Do you really think the jump from books to freely globally accessible data instantly available is a smaller jump than internet to ChatGPT? This is insane!!
It's not just smaller, but neglectable (in comparison).
In the internet era you had to parse the questions with your own brain. You just didn't necessarily need to solve them yourself.
In ChatGPT era you don't even need to read the questions. At all. The questions could be written in a language you don't understand, and you still are able generate plausible answers to them.
Obvious ChatGPT. I don't know how it is even a question... if you showed GPT3.5 to people from < 20th centuries there would've been a worldwide religion around it.
I recall the kerfuffle about (IIRC) llama where the engineer lost his mind thinking they had spawned life in a machine and felt it was "too dangerous to release," so it's not a ludicrous take. I would hope that the first person to ask "LLM Jesus" how many Rs are in strawberry would have torpedoed the religion, but (a) I've seen dumber mind viruses (b) it hasn't yet
I don't think that's really a useful question, honestly.
If you asked a person from the 1920's to choose what was more impressive between a Microwave oven and cellular communication (both consequences of the invention of radar), they'd probably pick the oven.
In the internet era you had to parse the questions with your own brain. You just didn't necessarily need to solve them yourself.
In ChatGPT era you don't even need to read the questions. At all. The questions could be written in a language you don't understand, and you still are able generate plausible answers to them.