According to the NHS' Digital inclusion for health and social care study, over 11 million people lack the basic digital skills to use the internet effectively. That's over 20% of the population

Among those most likely to be digitally illiterate are the elderly, socially excluded groups and people with a disability.

Although this statistic is projected to shrink, the process is likely to be slow (it's thought that the figure will be more like 8% by 2030). That may be about to change though, thanks to OpenAI's ChatGPT and similar technologies.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot. It was launched by OpenAI in November 2022 and instantly drew media and tech sector attention for its intuitive and eerily human-like discussion capabilities.

The software works by referencing huge amounts of information, something like 175 billion parameters, sources like newspapers, books, and research papers and including a snapshot of the internet from 2021. It uses a field of machine learning known as Natural Language Processing – it's not actual Artificial Intelligence but it's likely as close as we can get today.

Now free for the public to use, ChatGPT is being used by people to answer such existential questions as (these are genuinely the top 5):

Are you a Robot?

What is your name?

How does it work?

How are you?

What do you think about [Celebrity]?

It's also pretty good at writing articles, stories and even computer code – something which the dev team at Rocca are becoming a little nervous about.

What's next for this technology?

This week Microsoft announced that it was going to invest $10 billion into OpenAI (a paltry sum they likely found behind a sofa) – it's when big tech starts to take notice that you know a step change is about to occur in the industry and society as a whole.

The software giant already uses OpenAI’s technology in its own products, though its executives say this only scratches the surface of what is in the pipeline.

Accelerating accessibility

What is becoming apparent to Microsoft and others in the sector is how this type of technology could completely eradicate barriers to using technology for those who struggle to do so.

Being able to talk, in plain language, to a computer opens the door to many 'frictionless' uses (we say this with confidence because we're working on some).

Imagine your grandparents being able to securely interact with their bank or a retailer online by talking or typing to it. Or instructing a computer to perform a complex task without having the foggiest concept of the mechanics involved, without a mouse or a keyboard.

All at once it seems the very thing which excludes a large part of society from key services could be ended with a simply structured sentence.

What is truly impressive about the technology is its speed of implementation. Often it's months and not years from research paper to commercial reality, and this in itself means that advances in the technology will accelerate at an unprecedented pace.

There are barriers to overcome – it's thought that the average ChatGPT search consumes 7 times the energy than a Google search, but we think these will be rapidly resolved.

It's conceivable then that digital literacy may be eradicated at a much greater pace than imagined by government, and at last technology can truly benefit all.

This article was written using ChatGPT (just kidding).