The Night the Rules Changed

November 30th, 2022. I was debugging code in a coffee shop when my phone buzzed: "Have you seen this thing from OpenAI?"

I typed a question I'd been wrestling with for hours. The kind of architectural problem that usually requires a whiteboard, two colleagues, and a long walk. The response came back in seconds. It wasn't just plausible. It was good.

The ordinary setting where extraordinary shifts often find us

I remember the specific feeling: not excitement, not fear, but vertigo. The sensation of discovering that the ground you've been standing on was never quite where you thought it was.

The Assumption I Didn't Know I Had

For twenty years, I'd carried an unconscious belief: that certain cognitive tasks required human judgment. Writing. Analysis. Synthesis. The messy work of wrestling meaning from complexity. That first conversation didn't just challenge this assumption. It made me realize I'd never consciously examined it.

The technology itself wasn't new. GPT-3 had existed since 2020. What changed was accessibility. OpenAI wrapped it in a chat interface and made it free. No API keys. No waiting lists. And suddenly, a truth hiding in plain sight became visible: the gap between human and machine capability was narrower than we'd assumed.

ChatGPT reached one million users in five days.¹ Netflix took 3.5 years. Instagram took 2.5 months.² But speed wasn't the disorienting part. The disorienting part was watching the floor rise beneath everyone's feet.

The future arrived faster than the past prepared us for

What the Vertigo Revealed

The rules that shifted weren't the obvious ones. Scarcity changed: cognitive outputs that were expensive became cheap overnight. Expertise changed: the floor rose dramatically, even if the ceiling stayed put. Speed changed: the time between idea and prototype collapsed.

But something else became clearer too. Human judgment about what's worth doing. The need for context, stakes, relationships. The importance of trust. When anyone can generate plausible text, verification matters more than ever.

My grandfather was a project manager for a NASA contractor in the sixties. He watched rooms full of engineers with slide rules get replaced by computers the size of refrigerators, then watched those get replaced by machines that fit on a desk. He would have recognized this moment. "Tools change," he used to say. "Work changes. But the need to be useful doesn't change."

The night the rules changed wasn't really one night. It was the night we started paying attention.

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References

Footnotes

1. Hu, K. (2023). "ChatGPT sets record for fastest-growing user base." Reuters ↩

2. Buchholz, K. (2023). "ChatGPT Sprints to One Million Users." Statista ↩