Du Xiaomeng: ChatGPT, AI and Digital Economy
Aug 06-2023
At the recent MBA Lectern, Du Xiaomeng, NSD Assistant Researcher and BiMBA Deputy Dean, shared her thoughts on ChatGPT, AI and digital economy. Her research focuses on the impact of digital technology on industries and has resulted in some award-winning papers.
ChatGPT signals that humans are crossing a historic threshold from the information era into the knowledge era when costs of acquiring knowledge plunge and people can exchange ideas with machines in natural language, said Du. Consumers are going to enjoy the experience of talking and giving instructions to cars and home appliances. As ChatGPT becomes an underlying platform technology, it’s being embedded as a core capability into the fundamental systems of many manufacturers and cloud platform providers such as Amazon and Microsoft, thus bringing a productivity-enhancing technological breakthrough.
In its 13th Five-Year Plan, released in 2015, China identified four digital technologies as major strategic directions: AI, blockchain, cloud computing, and big data. The 14th Five Year Plan, unveiled in 2020, pushed for their further development, which has been creating a profound impact on the country’s economy, industry, and society, said Du.
She also traced the trajectory of AI and delineated its three levels: perceptive technology, cognitive technology, and decision-making technology. Rooted in these technologies, many applications have been developed, including voice recognition, identity recognition, and facial recognition. She drew attention to the imperative of developing new energies to power supercomputers and cited the example of the research by the team behind Open AI into controllable nuclear fusion technology. Another area to watch out for is how to use secondary distribution to compensate for AI-induced human job loss.
After outlining the evolution of natural language processing technology, Du Xiaomeng delved into the far-reaching impact of ChatGPT on education. In a way, ChatGPT can be seen as an undergraduate student; after some drilling in the linguistic data and knowledge of a certain field, it’s capable of growing into a graduate student or even an expert, said Du. Within the next three years, ChatGPT-based applications will be born in profusion in a wide range of industries, yet it doesn’t mean that humans don’t need to learn anymore. Instead, Du believed that jobs that involve emotional and inter-personal exchanges, need creativity and innovation, and require field execution and operation, are unlikely to be fully replaced by ChatGPT. In the same vein, she said that management, which is both art and science, is a relatively secure choice; therefore, pursuing an MBA remains a wise decision.
The new digital tide is expected to last for at least 20 years, so it’s high time to learn and plan, said Du. China is doubling down on new infrastructure, digital technology and digital economy, as specified in a comprehensive blueprint known as Digital China. Du said that NSD scholars are closely following and researching the development of strategic emergent industries, the synergy of humans and data, and the impact of digital technology on both labor force structure and people’s sense of the value of happiness.
