TECHNOLOGY × LANGUAGE

The Machines Start Talking

2022 CE

History · Contemporary · Holocene · Meghalayan

In November 2022, a conversational program was opened to the public, and language, the species' oldest exclusive technology, stopped being exclusive. The science arrived fast: a randomized experiment in Science showed professionals writing 40 percent faster with better output and the weakest writers gaining most; in PNAS, the model's behavior across trust, fairness and cooperation games proved statistically indistinguishable from a random human's, skewing altruistic; economists began mapping how many jobs the models could touch.

Why it matters

In 1950, Turing replaced the question 'can machines think?' with a test: could a machine's conversation pass for a person's? Seventy-two years later, hundreds of millions of people put that test to daily use, and in controlled games the machine now passes. Whether this is a tool like writing or a rupture like nothing prior is this timeline's first genuinely open ending: the fiche after this one has not happened yet.

Dating & uncertainty

ChatGPT opened to the public in November 2022, and the measurements followed within months: a randomized experiment on 453 professionals found writing tasks completed 40 percent faster with 18 percent higher quality, and the gap between stronger and weaker writers narrowed; a PNAS study found the model's choices in classic behavioral games statistically indistinguishable from a random human's. Turing had proposed exactly this criterion in 1950.

Sources

1. Turing (1950), Mind · Computing machinery and intelligencedoi:10.1093/mind/lix.236.433
2. Noy & Zhang (2023), Science · Experimental evidence on the productivity effects of generative artificial intelligencedoi:10.1126/science.adh2586
3. Mei, Xie, Yuan & Jackson (2024), PNAS · A Turing test of whether AI chatbots are behaviorally similar to humansdoi:10.1073/pnas.2313925121
4. Eloundou, Manning, Mishkin & Rock (2024), Science · GPTs are GPTs: labor market impact potential of LLMsdoi:10.1126/science.adj0998

Our species’ history as one day

23:59:581.1 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day