One More Thing
So there I was...
Watching helplessly. You know the Sorcerer's Apprentice scene in Fantasia, when the broom multiplies, and the masses go out of control and there is nothing Mickey can do to stop them? This was like that, but there was no Yen Sid to reverse the spell. In this living nightmare, it was a fax machine spitting out an entire roll of thermal paper, not endless buckets of water creating a whirlpool.
I had just returned from Desert Storm and was working at a national bank in Cupertino. We recently received our first fax machine, and soon enough marketing companies were sending us entire menus from multiple restaurants, ads for lawn care, car wash services, and whatever else you can think of. Not one item at a time, but as one endless stream. It would tie up the machine for an hour unless we unplugged it (that was the reboot function in 1991).
I'm part of the early Gen Xers, a small cohort that grew up analog and digital, a foot in each of two very different worlds. I learned to type on my grandmother's Royal manual typewriter, which sits on a shelf behind me now. It's what I used to write my middle school science fair report. I still have the slide rules my father used as a mechanical engineer (and he could beat me to my same answer on a calculator).
The digital world emerged slowly but relentlessly. I remember setting up Pong to work on channel 3. My first computer was a Macintosh SE, my first email account was AOL, and I bought the first iPhone the day it was released. I've lived through the years and months and days of firsts that followed decades of doing things more or less the same way. It is a different perspective understanding that to change fonts I don't need to change out the ball on an IBM Selectric, I can just choose one of hundreds from a dropdown menu (and that font choice will speak volumes about my credibility).
Mike Pearl penned a great article in Gizmodo yesterday that talks about how my generation is the least freaked out by AI. He references a Pew Research Center American Trends Panel's survey that found "a majority of adults under 30 (55%) now say they're more concerned than excited about AI." Why is that?
Well, here's my Gen X perspective, as I listen to Rush. My immigrant grandparents were born in the 1800's. My parents were born before the Great Depression. I watched the Apollo 17 moon landing on our black and white Zenith TV before heading off to elementary school. The family members that make up my experience span 140 years. My grandmother lived 106 of those. When I asked her how she coped with all the change, she said in her heavy German accent, "What can I do? I just go along with it."
She was born in the age of horse and buggy in Trier, and passed away over a century later in the age of cell phones and space shuttles in Palo Alto. Every generation in my family lived through major technological and political upheavals, and they persevered. Not every technological advance has been great, but learning and improvement always follows. Professionally, I have worked in machine/deep learning, generative AI, and now agentic. On the near horizon is post-transformer architecture (I'll write more about this another time), which has the potential to be one of the largest economic disrupters in recent memory. I'm actually ridiculously excited about what's next.
I guess my thesis here is that if you've been around long enough to see enough, the next new thing is just one more thing. Gen X doesn't freak out over technology because our origins and experiences are pre-technology, and we developed with the technologies and all of the hard lessons learned as we adopted them, like 20 continuous feet of fax paper on the floor. Where there is danger, and it has always been thus, is technology outpacing our capacity for effective decision making. I guess at the end of the day I have great faith in our species' incredible penchant for self-preservation... despite the head-scratching efforts of some to do otherwise.
Source: People From 50- to 61-Years-Old Are Reportedly the Least Freaked Out by AI, Gizmodo
#AI #GenX #Technology #Perspective #STIW