Technology May Finally Be Passing Me By

This morning I was out walking when a driverless Waymo drove past me on the street. There was nobody in the car, front or back. At once it struck me that I may have reached the point in my life when I have far less time ahead of me than behind me and that society is moving full-steam ahead with or without me. I used to think I was on the cutting edge, but now I feel like the cutting edge is just beyond my reach. Or rather, my desirable reach.

My mother was afraid of computers. She said it was because she couldn’t type, but that had nothing to do with it. I know plenty of older folks who have embraced the modern age, but my mom was not one of them. We finally bought her a smart phone a few years ago, and she returned it to go back to a flip phone. I made fun of her, but this morning as that Waymo cruised past me I think I finally understood her. Unfortunately, she’s no longer with us so I can’t apologize for giving her a hard time about her technophobia.

I get now. It is overwhelming. Today we live in a world with powerful computers in our pockets (and on our wrists), cars driving themselves, every song ever recorded available at the touch of a button, drones fighting wars, and artificial intelligence about to change humankind forever. And while younger people embrace the latest advances, I simply don’t want to. Yes, I can’t live without Spotify and my Android phone, but what’s coming next sort of frightens me. And when I look to my future, given my previous health battles, it’d be a miracle if I get another 25-30 years on this planet. I’m starting to think I’d prefer to hunker down in my nice little bubble and ignore the future. Just give me enough books to read and music to listen to and that’s really all I want in life.

Artificial intelligence in particular is for the young. Don’t get me wrong, I expect to benefit from AI over the next few decades, but I don’t want to be in the AI business or come to rely on AI like I have with computers, smart phones, and streaming. I’d prefer to sit back and watch as the next generation struggles with how to stuff this genie back in the bottle.

If you’re not paying attention to AI, or the ways it has already changed our lives, you can be forgiven for not fully understanding the ramifications. The little civil war we just witnessed at OpenAI was not a small thing — it may very well have changed the course of human history forever. And I’m not being hyperbolic. The good guys did not win the OpenAI war. Maureen Dowd did as good a job of explaining it as anyone in her column in the New York Times yesterday. If the corporations are leading the AI charge, we’re fucked.

Maybe it was naive to think it’d turn out any other way. Money and power drive the world and placing the hopes and dreams of AI in the hands of a nonprofit was altruistic but untenable given the amount of computing power the organization needs to advance AI (in whatever direction it wants). You can continue to keep your head in the sand on AI, like so many people have with climate change. Climate change is going to be irrelevant in a world run by machines.

But this is not a blog post about AI. This is a blog post about how I’m going to react to it. And like my mother looking at computers as if they are supernatural, I don’t think I have it in me to worry about where AI is going to take us as a species. I just don’t have that much time left. Maybe that’s why my mom never cared to use a computer or even a smart phone. The future can be scary.

I feel for future generations. My kid doesn’t have a choice but to pay attention to self-driving cars, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence. At 26 years old, they have their whole life ahead of them. Of course they are worried about what that life is going to look like, and I bear some responsibility for having brought them into this world.

I think every generation reaches a moment in time when the world seems to be going at a pace that scares the pants off it. My parents lived at the start of the Information Age. My grandparents witnessed the birth of television, talking movies, international flights, and a man on the moon. My great grandparents left their little European shtetl and came to America at the dawn of the Industrial Age. Imagine what my great grandparents would have thought if you could go back to their time and you showed them a smart phone or Amazon Alexa?

This existential moment for me is probably a natural part of aging. It coincides with a time in my life in which my parents have died, my friends are getting older and fighting more health issues, and my peers are looking at retirement as something within reach. It’s part of the circle of life.

Is it wrong to think about slowing down versus speeding up? I’m not suggesting I should ignore ChatGPT or driving cars. But I am suggesting I’m not going to let the ramifications of new technology cause me to lose sleep. And believe me, if you spend any time digging into the ramifications of AI you’d lose sleep.

You might think it hypocritical that I’m writing this post at a coffee shop on my laptop which is connected to the internet via wi-fi and my bluetooth speakers are blasting music directly into my ears. But these technologies belong to my generation. I came of age in a time of personal computing and digital music. Just like my parents came of age during a time of microwave ovens and cable television. I’m not anti-progress. Far from it. I’ve been an early adopter of nearly every new technology that launched during my lifetime. Hell, I surfed the internet on a dial-up modem using Netscape Navigator and visited the World Wide Web using Mosaic. I love technology.

But I can’t get my head around what’s next. To me AI in particular is a slippery slope with nothing short of the future of our species hanging in the balance. It’s too much for my little brain to get my mind around. Sure, I’ll use ChatGPT to assist in my writing and maybe even help with daily tasks. But I don’t have the bandwidth to contemplate a future in which AI continues to advance at its current pace. I don’t want to know what Q-Star is. I don’t want to imagine where that level of self-awareness in a machine could take us.

I used to think it’d be great to live long enough to witness the singularity, when man and machine merge. I even thought I’d be cool with having my mind dowloaded in to a computer so I could effectively live forever. But then I watched more than a few episodes of Black Mirror and I changed my mind. Technology is not so black and white. Things can go right, but they can also go very wrong.

Seeing that Waymo this morning really got me thinking. And I think I want to stop thinking so much.