In an interview with CNN, Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center, he mentioned that chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT are just “tape recorders”.
"It takes snippets of what's on the human-made web, puts them together, and passes them off as if it were created by itself," he said. "And people say, 'Oh my God, he's human, he's human.'
However, he said, chatbots can't tell right from wrong: "That has to be done by a human."
According to Kaku, humanity is in the second stage of computer evolution. The first was the analogical stage, "when we calculated with sticks, stones, levers, gears, pulleys, strings". After that, around World War II, he said, we turned to electrically powered transistors that enabled the development of the microchip and helped shape today's digital landscape. But this digital landscape is based on the idea of two states such as “on” and “off” and uses binary notation consisting of zeros and ones.
“Mother Nature would be kidding us because Mother Nature doesn't use zeros and ones. Mother Nature calculates with electrons, electron waves, waves that create molecules. And that is why we are now entering the third stage.”
He believes that the next technological stage will be in the quantum realm. Quantum computing is an emerging technology that uses the various states of particles such as electrons to greatly increase the processing power of a computer.
Instead of using two-state computer chips, quantum computers use several states of vibrating waves, which makes them capable of analyzing and solving problems much faster than normal computers.
But beyond business applications, Kaku said quantum computing could also help advance healthcare.
“Cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's disease – these are diseases at the molecular level. We are unable to cure these diseases because we have to learn the language of nature, which is the language of molecules and quantum electrons.”
