AAAT – All the AI, All the Time

Imagine being a carpenter in the age of plastic. A user of stone age tools when metal came about. Trying to advocate for the wider use of horses after the train had been invented.

History shows that one thing supplants another. It happens all the time. Except… not in my lifetime.

During my lifetime, I don’t remember anything replacing anything else.

I’ve lived through an era of unprecedented change. There’s been innovation after innovation. Rapid, incredibly rapid, change. The computer, the internet, mobile phones. They’ve upended the way that we behave, think and plan.

But, they never felt like they were supplanting anything, because they were supplanting prior ideas and technologies, during my own lifetime, as I lived.

I was taught to write with a pen, only to find that the pen was increasingly a niche idea when I became an adult.

There were paper letters which people put in the mail when I was growing up, but by the time I was finding my way in the world, almost all the non-personal communication had gone to email.

Cars were a thing, planes were a thing, and despite some changes in the way that they work, then still have wheels, steering and wings. They’re basically the same.

I appear to have been born at just the right time for none of the more recent innovations to really feel like innovations. They happened alongside my own growth and aging, and I didn’t really see them as all that profound – to me, personally. They were there, and I learned to use them in the same way that I learned to speak, silently and without a great deal of conscious effort.

I could see that for some, especially those a generation older, these changes were (and are) hard. You might have had that moment in your own life when you are tasked with explaining to someone older how to navigate to a setting on their phone. The disconnect is profound. What seems simple, obvious even, is fraught with dead ends and frustration. They fail in ways that are hard to imagine. The obvious is, in fact, not obvious. The obvious is because of familiarity, nothing more.

The curious thing is that most of the people who suffer these frustrations put them aside fairly quickly. They try to find the setting on the phone, they fail, they get frustrated and then they put it to one side and move on with their lives.

This is the new pattern I’m seeing in my own life.

Let me explain.

So all the innovations happened during my own life, are part of my life. I get how to navigate the world in which they are a part. I can find the setting on the mobile phone. I can use the computer to do the thing.

But I’ve reached an age where I’m coming to understand that in some areas my curiosity has limits. My desire to use the latest new thing is not always as great as my desire to use the old, familiar, thing. I have become the person who will need the help of those younger than me. I will feel the frustration of my own limits, but then I’ll put it to one side and get on with my life.

This is AI to me. It’s happening to the world, and the tsunami will crash against all of us.

I’ve become the person from the older generation. I’m needing the younger person to show me how it’s done.

My curiosity for many things has no limits, I will get older and want to know more, but I’m not sure that AI will hold my curiosity. Others can do that, and they are. They are are flooding the landscape with AI.

I will use AI. I will worry about AI. I will watch it grow, embed, concern me and amaze me. But I will need help with it, to understand it, to figure out when I want it and when I’ll spurn it.

AI is everywhere, it’s AAAT – All the AI, All the Time.