THE MORNING RANT: Revolution or Evolution? Maybe AI is Simply this Decade’s Microwave Oven or Calculator

As a child in the 1970s and a high school and college student in the ‘80s, I have seen plenty of revolutionary new developments that were going “to change everything.” AI is the latest thing being so celebrated. Will it be? Perhaps. The internet certainly revolutionized everything. But maybe AI will prove to be nothing more than an evolutionary tool that modifies how data is gathered.

I was a little kid learning arithmetic when my dad brought home the first calculator I had ever seen. This amazing device was performing wizardry that boggled the minds of my siblings and me. As amazing as this device was, there was a pensive consensus among adults that the need for anyone to learn math was being made obsolete. As it turns out, the need to learn math did not go away.

The parents of a good friend bought a microwave oven (called a “Radar Range”) when I was in grade school. This space-age device could cook a roast in mere minutes! Cooking was clearly being revolutionized, and baking was now obsolete. My buddy and I loved to snack on baked potatoes because it was so amazing to pop one into the microwave and have a steaming hot spud in just minutes. Fifty years later I only use my microwave oven for re-heating and for TV dinners, and even then, I still prefer to reheat food in the toaster oven. The oven and stove top are still heavily used.

The Concorde jet went into commercial service in 1976, and we saw the future in it - supersonic air travel would have us whisking across continents in less time than it takes to drive from Dallas to Houston. Forty-nine years later there are no supersonic commercial airplanes in service.

In high school I was still writing term papers long-hand, then typing them once I had all my scratch-outs re-worked. Word Processors were going to revolutionize writing. And they did! Thanks to Word Perfect, and later Microsoft Word, I gained the ability to put words on paper almost as fast as I can think, and easily edit myself. But it’s still me doing the writing and typing.

Similarly, spreadsheets (first LOTUS and then Excel) simplified calculations for me, and made calculators obsolete. But this just enabled me to do more complex calculations by myself.

Watching movies at home (other than network broadcasts with commercials) was a foreign concept in my youth, but HBO came along, and then video rentals. This seemed like an awful development for movie theaters, but instead, movie theaters thrived and continued to evolve for several more decades. It wasn’t movies at home that finally killed off theaters, it was the imposition of Covid sharia combined with awful studio offerings that dealt the crippling blow.

A decade ago, with auto manufacturers putting the first self-driving cars through limited real-world test drives, it was reported as a fact that self-driving cars would dominate sales by the 2020s, and that driving as we always knew it was about to be obsolete. While there are a handful of self-driving taxis in a few cities, I know exactly zero people that own a true self-driving car and most manufacturers are no longer promising them in the near future.

Most of these revolutionary new products simply turned out to be tools that were adapted into daily use. Microwaves are a tool in the kitchen, mainly used for re-heating. Word processors replaced typewriters. With “lane assist” and cruise control, my car has the ability to drive itself on highways without any inputs from me. These are all cool improvements, but they did not replace cooking, writing, or driving.

My experience so far with AI is that it can possibly improve internet research, but beyond that, it doesn’t do a very good job at cognitive analysis. Plus, it is constrained by the political biases it’s fed, so it is probably not capable of producing original thoughts or ideas that a conservative writer would produce. That will be left to actual thinkers.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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