I had the same shock and awe response as my circle of friends who teach communication at advanced levels in the US. What I've noticed is that the GPT text deve

I had the same shock and awe response as my circle of friends who teach communication at advanced levels in the US. What I've noticed is that the GPT text developments have given rise to the standard expectation that we are by-default speaking to bots, whether they are robo calls, support chat, email, or recruiters - they're computers no matter the form of their sensing or communication. The loss of connection reminds me of Sherry Turkle's Alone Together as I've realized how much I value interacting with a human cashier at Whole Foods post the self-checkout parallel to employing customers as part of supply chain (grocery baggers being the last mile just like gas pumping). The need for humans to evolve toward robots in a reverse anthropomorphism that I don't have a word for was predicted by Janna Anderson almost a decade ago in various online publications: https://www.elon.edu/u/directory/profile/?user=andersj https://www.elon.edu/u/directory/profile/?user=andersj For me, the sadder story outside education is the kind of structural unemployment we're likely to see given the fact that entire skillsets that took decades to build, while not instantly evaporating, will be disrupted by 2030 in ways that will make 2005 onward social media unintended consequences look pale by comparison. The outcome of the sea change we're seeing now is likely to be similar to the way that "computer programmer" and "software engineer" became proxies for "before 1990" and "post-y2k", respectively in our culture that gave rise to the T-shaped employee. That is, I'm not sure what "communication professor" and "english teacher" mean going forward but post-2020 is likely to be an inflection point in that world. The difference, of course, is that in software, the move was always additive in terms of breadth, depth, and skill. In communication, that difference is subtractive and closer to the impact of declarative vs. imperative technology. I'm not sure I look forward to leveling the communication playing field with a parameter on an API that says voice="David Foster Wallace" or voice="Byung Chul Han" or voice ="Geoff Dyer", but it seems likely that those are all well within reach soon given the data. I can only imagine what this looks like at a legal-social-cultural API level. Shibboleth?