Binderama60for60

Breaking this essay out from the larger post.

Information Technology

Nobody knows nothing.

A.I. is about to strike like lightning inside a haboob during an earthquake and ensuing tsunami that thunders across every walk of life. Some of it might be good, a lot will certainly be bad, and the rest no one has a clue about. You wouldn’t see the world’s largest companies investing trillions researching something they already understand.

I’ve been connected to the high-tech business for most of my career, from weak PCs attached to the rickety internet of the 80s and 90s, to mobility, smart homes and phones, the cloud, IoT, gaming, holography and a bunch of other flavors-of-the-year. In my opinion, there has never been anything that comes even close to the potential for disruption that A.I. will deliver.

Goosies!

What makes this different is accessibility. Whereas inventions of the last 50-1,000,000 years took years and centuries to gain large-scale implementation–and often only by certain educated or moneyed classes–A.I. is already in your face and in your hand.

Here’s an example from a simpler time: my Gran used to share marvelous stories of inventions she’d witnessed in her lifetime, starting with the Wright Brothers. She spoke as though she’d been there with them at Kitty Hawk chasing the glider down a hill. She would have been two.

It wasn’t until her 60s that Gran flew on an airplane. That’s how long adoption used to take. Btw, they served real food back then, on real plates with real metal flatware. Gran would filch the whole set and give it to me when I met her at the gate.

Where was I? Oh right.

Three years ago A.I. felt distant and utilitarian—a quiet back-room tool monitoring supply chains and assembly lines in the hands of responsible managers. Now it’s churning out Hollywood-level films in minutes, along with a tidal wave of social and political effluvia for gullible morons to feed on.

Plus, unlike most tech platforms that require years for coders and engineers to master, if you don’t know how to use A.I., A.I. will explain itself to you. “What do you think you’re doing, Dave?”

Soon, it will be eating your lunch for you too.

For those of you who crave monumental change and epic disruption, the next few years should be a blast. For some of us staring at the next chapter of life, it’ll be fascinating to watch. For everyone else, vaya con Dios.

Which makes me wonder: If A.I. is now capable of making movies, running companies and curing cancer, why are customer service chatbots still so unbelievably stupid?

A little history

Here’s a phrase I’ve used ironically for a long time: “In my day…” These days, the irony is gone.

Anyway…

…In my day, if you wanted to create something, you used your hands and your head. If you wanted to share it, you tacked it up on the cork board or put it in an envelope and trusted the USPS to deliver it in a week or two.

In my day, classroom handouts were printed on paper and delivered wet, smelling of chemicals. Keyboards were called typewriters in my day, and it sometimes took two fingers to get a single key to work; if you made a mistake: Whiteout, more chemicals. My Dad taught me to work a real B&W photo lab, even more chemicals, the kind that made you woozy.

Where was I? Oh right. I think those chemicals might have retarded some synapses.

Dad was the first person I knew to own a computer, a Commodore in the late 70s. He used it for word processing mostly. I took a computer class senior year of high school, spending most periods texting with kids at other schools. I paid an uber-geek $10 to write BASIC code for my final project, a word-processing application. You might call it an “app.”

More computer labs in college, connected to a screaming-loud dot-matrix printer. I designed graphics for the college TV station, filling exactly 64 pixels with one of 16 colors. I typed my first telex at Disney, sitting in some outpost near Orlando at 11:00 at night, surrounded by superiors feeding me material to share with the good people of Russia. In my day, it was called “the USSR.”

Email eventually replaced inter-office envelopes when I was at Universal. When the internet started making noise, I was told by a promotions guy that, basically, you’d have a printer on top of your television that would spit out coupons. One night there was a party on the backlot for an internet company. I crashed it. I thought, “these people are the people of the future!”

While I was still in Florida I bought my first computer: a Macintosh Quadra 660AV with 8MB of RAM and a 250MB hard disk. With the monitor, the printer, scanner, modem and software (Office and Photoshop 2.0), I laid out a keen $6K when I was making about $30K. My engineer and design friends scoffed, “Oh, I thought you said you got a computer.” In my day, Apple was an albatross.

Fast-forward a few years, past AOL, past Netscape, okay you can go faster, yes LISA, Compaq, CompUSA, Friendster, MySpace, RadioShack…

Okay, stop here.

One day I find myself in the demo lab at Intel HQ in Santa Clara. I’d been hired by an agency to support Intel on their executives’ international keynote tours. I’m staring into the back of a server rack as someone explains to our group how it operates. I nodded occasionally and affected some grunts of understanding, overcompensating for the fact I did not have a clue what any of it meant. And I mean any of it.

That’s when I realized the man standing to my left was Andy Grove, the Chairman of Intel and recent Time magazine Person of the Year. Even this Silicon Valley noob knew that Andy was a legend.

Yadda yadda yadda, a few years later, I’m standing backstage at an Intel event in an arena in Anaheim. Andy Grove is wearing leather pants, about to take the stage to address 5,000 of his team. I tell him he looks sexy. Eyes dart, his wife Eva howls, Andy blushes. We’d come a long way.

Do people still fast-forward?

If so, keep going. For the next few years, I traveled all over the world with Intel executives, staging keynotes and touring labs, fabs and universities in Europe, South America, China and India. In those years and beyond, I was fortunate to interact with all sorts of tech pioneers, as an event and content producer. I spent time in prep and on stage with Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Eric Schmidt, Larry Ellison, Steve Balmer, Satya Nadella, Jensen Huang and others.

I understood my role, but like with my previously chronicled celebrity affliction, spending a few moments or hours in conversation with these giants left an impression. These guys are engineering history. Double entendre intended.

Some of them will be writing and perhaps rewriting history. What’s going on with our government and companies like Anthropic is chilling. Unleashed autonomous weaponry, mass surveillance of civilians, complete opacity. And we’re supposed to be the good guys; imagine what our enemies will do with it. Are doing with it.

Now if they could just make that Walgreens.com chatbot understand what “REPRESENTATIVE!” means.

Okay, this is my stop. It’s been a good ride, thanks for reading about my journey from pencils and mimeograph ink to A.I. in my life, so far. I’m gonna hop off here, but I’ll definitely stay engaged; I want to see it unfold from the cheap seats and how it all ends. I hope I end before it ends us. Not kidding.

A.I. Postscript

As with a lot of these posts, I consult ChatGPT before posting. In its analysis, it added this:

One Very Important Meta Move (If You’re Brave)
You are literally using AI right now to refine this memoir. You could say: I’m writing this with the help of the very thing I’m describing. That would:

• Humanize the fear.
• Show adaptation.
• Remove hypocrisy.
• Add humility.

That would elevate the entire chapter.

Post-postscript

When I fed GPT an updated rev, it suggested edits to its edits. Feels very human already.

With that, Godspeed, people of the future! Godspeed.