The next generation of 4th Industrial Revolution and Ethics Implications for Information Technology professionals (programmers).

The 4th Industrial Revolution refers to the current era of technological advancement, characterized by the integration of digital, physical, and biological systems. Currently this is marked by artificial intelligence (AI) interfaces, robotics, blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT) and big data. The new age 4^th Industrial revolution includes things such as grocery shopping recommendation engines, voice-activated road map assistances, image recognition engines as well as visually impaired navigation systems. Web3s, ChatGPT (or other chatbots) and many other things are the future of 4IR. 

Web3s is the next evolution of the internet beyond Web 2, which focuses on creating a decentralized internet, where users have greater control over their data and interactions online. It seeks to provide more privacy, security and autonomy providing a new digital landscape where users can interact directly with each other. It essentially aims to rid users of bank systems, social media platforms and many other online marketplaces. In general, Web3 definitions raises huge ethical concerns. Decentralising the internet introduces high possibility of abuse as it grants everyone the freedom and decentralised power. Web3 also is transparent, which contradicts the privacy provision as it uses blockchain technology. It also brings in high cyber security concerns and risks. Web3s have potential of being developers next projects however it is very important to have solutions for the risks this may raise first. It is important to remember how we did not see Chatbots making such huge changes so quick when ChatGPT was released and to get on the train of Web3 designs before the train of innovation misses us again.

Chatbots are conversational AI interface that utilizes natural language processing algorithms making a fast popularity stance due to its practicality and easy access. Also, its popularity was increased when GPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer) was released November 2022. Chatbots algorithms are based on deep learning algorithms developed to generate text-based responses which are relevant to the input of the user. It has been a topic of interest for everyone in different industries, and the question most people have been asking themselves is “Will ChatGPT replace my career”, as it has been a question most professionals ask themselves since the beginning of artificial intelligence or 4iR. For programmers and data scientists though, this question sound more like “Will using ChatGPT increase my workflow, are there any plagiarism implications”. 

Yes, chatbots and ChatGPT can assist programmers increase their workflow by:

1. Debugging code: Chatbots are trained to help programmers debug code by providing relevant solutions or suggestions for errors encountered by programmers.
2. Completing code: Chatbots help programmers complete their code.
3. Documenting code: Chatbots can give programmers pointers on code documentation. Sometimes you get in the work, you forget you are collaborating with other people and forget to properly document your code. ChatGPT can assist you in that it can help document your code properly.
4. Project management: Chatbots can also be used to help programmers with project management by providing them with assistance in their monitoring of the development process, milestones and deliverables and deadlines.

A fellow IT enthusiast once said, you cannot plagiarize code, someone else has already done the exact same thing you are trying to do, just in a different case study. It is beautiful to use ChatGPT but also to remember that AI-assisted interfaces are machine learning algorithms. They learn from trained data. 

The following are the ethical concerns for programmers for using chatbots.

1. Bias: Chatbots are trained on text data provided by users or the internet in general. Responses will have some biasness. It is very important programmers are aware of this bias for their projects and when they use Chatbots to take this biasness into consideration.
2. Privacy: Chatbots technology often involves collecting and storing user data. Programmers need to take care to collect only the data required and input only information not sensitive to the interfaces. For example, you cannot feed Chatbots classified company information which no one else has access to.
3. Misinformation: Chatbots can be programmed to provide information on a wide range of topics. However, if the chatbot is not carefully programmed it may provide inaccurate information or misinformation. As a programmer, you must be aware when creating chatbots that they are leading the programme to accurate and necessary information.
4. Transparency: It is important to state that you have used Chatbots for assistance in your work. As well as when programming the chatbots, it is important to inform the users that they are chatting to artificial intelligence and not a human, this also allows the user to refine their input knowing that they are chatting to either a person with sympathy abilities or an AI with no personal opinions or beliefs.

ChatGPT started making waves and noise when it was released. It is therefore impactive for us to look at the opportunities and challenges that comes with this new AI technology that cannot be ignored. Many people see how it will revolutionize the future. However vast amount of people villainises it while others learn from it and take necessary steps to upskill so that it, they are not left without jobs when it takes over if it will ever take over. I think it is very important to note AI does not have a mind of its own and it will always depend on human input to train it and develop it further.