By The HR Observer Staff

“It is always hard to say exactly what the impact of a technology is going to be,” Coursera’s CEO Jeff Maggioncalda commented on ChatGPT during his panel discussion at the World Government Summit in Dubai.

Maggioncalda said that ChatGPT “mimics” the language portion of the brain but is “not very good” at logical reasoning which puts people at a risk if they take the technology’s word verbatim.

“If people check their critical thinking at the door and they kind of outsource their thinking to the technology, they will be more vulnerable to the manipulation and the misinformation that this stuff is going to generate,” he added.

“So there’s kind of one two punch of I’m not critically thinking as much, and now I’m getting barraged with even more misinformation and manipulation,” he added, explaining that that is when the technology could be harmful for the society.

“But what it can do with language is extraordinary. What will this do for learning?” he asked.

Maggioncalda who leads the learning platform Coursera said that the online learning trajectory has changed over time from passive learning such as one way knowledge gaining to contributing to the learning process.

“The ability to watch something, to respond to it, to get a response to what you said, and then respond again and then maybe have a prompt and then ask for an example. It’s a lot like having a personal learning assistant who can help you learn things in ways that are more personal,” he explained further.

He added that technologies such as ChatGPT will not only learn human language but also programmatic language; a concern he voiced on the future of jobs in the technology companies that are currently letting go of their workforce.

This is not the first time Maggioncalda speaks of the importance of a tool such as ChatGPT; however, his remarks come at a critical time for tech companies who are expanding in investment on technologies and lessening their workforce.

“I think that we are in a period of change right now. That is extraordinary. You don’t know all the answers. It will take a lot of creativity and collaboration and experimentation and failure in order for us to find the right path,” Maggioncalda said.