50 Years Later
I wrote this in 2017 and decided it’s time for an addendum…
Amazing how much has changed in the last ~50 years. Even more amazing that it’s happened so gradually that, seemingly for most people, it’s about as remarkable as the sun rising in the morning and setting at night. A lot of other things have changed too, but I’m just thinking about technology…
When I was in high school in the early to mid 70’s we had a “computer” – ONE computer. For the entire school. A Wang 500, but only the advanced math students were allowed access to it. As I recall, it looked a lot like an electric typewriter and had a numeric display – eight red LEDs. Maybe some of you had access to it and can correct me, but it seems to me it was a glorified programmable calculator. Impressive for its time, I guess. There was no Internet. No CDs or digital music. No GPS. No digital cameras. No cell phones. My family had one phone, hardwired to the wall and connected to a party line. It was a rotary dial thing. When I was younger, calling my girlfriend 7 miles away was “long distance”. Calling my aunt in Chicago was a once-a-year big deal – we’d all gather around the phone and take turns saying hello. Our TV was a small (15 inch, maybe…?) black & white tube model which took a few seconds to warm up and display an image. We got two stations, sometimes, depending on the weather and time of year, a very grainy third. Radio was mostly local, though I remember how amazed I was one evening to pick up a broadcast from Israel on my Realistic short wave radio.
This afternoon I’m sitting here hunting and pecking out my thoughts on a slim one pound device not much smaller than our old family TV. It’s powered by an internal battery and has a brilliant color display. In terms of computing power, it’s light years beyond my old high school’s Wang 500 and connects wirelessly to a router elsewhere in the house. I can use it to call anywhere in the world for free… and it can include live streaming video, not just voice. Long distance? What’s that?
Addendum: And then there’s AI. It seems to me that the whole AI thing is spreading faster than a pandemic (just a wee sarcasm there – I’m not trying to insinuate any similarities beyond the obvious). Now, suddenly, I find myself daily conversing with one agent about my health and fitness, using another to generate soothing ‘music’ to help me unwind and sleep better, while a third and fourth suggest answers to other random questions, a fifth takes my meticulously written (but poorly recorded) original songs and generates near studio quality recordings – no need for multi-thousand dollar expenditures for hired musicians, singers and studio time. A sixth takes my descriptions of imagined images and generates surprisingly realistic scenes that I can then stitch together into videos to accompany my music. I might even mention a shadowy seventh – the so called ‘Apple Intelligence’ that occasionally understands my directives and helps manage my (not so) ‘smart home’.
Of course, like any tool, AI has both a good and a bad side. The Interwebs and social media are awash with AI ‘slop’ – empty calorie content designed solely to generate clicks. Worse yet, I have no doubts that self-serving political entities are quietly generating lies and misinformation to further their agendas and damage those of their opponents. Welcome to the war.