The future is a tidal wave and you can’t stop it by wishing, you say.

Maybe not, I reply. But I can move inland, build a stronger house, and better prepare myself for the impact, no?

Oh, without a shadow of a doubt, there is a risk of branding myself a luddite with these essays. 

Let’s take a step back.

Recently I stumbled upon a streaming channel that posts seventy-year-old manufacturing videos, dated British documentary-style clips narrated with crisp, articulated accents and showing the bustle inside post-war factories of the 1950s and 60s. Men in blazers using tools. Women in dresses sitting at tables sewing. This is how we hand polish lenses in eyeglasses. This is how rope is spun by a two men working with two hundred year old equipment. This is how dozens of women sit and paint delicate designs onto bone china. Everyone in those videos is dressed primly and everyone is using skills and crafts honed by centuries of inherited practice and knowledge. Without another shadow of a doubt, any and all of these factories today would almost certainly be automated with robots. 

And I’ll wager you one certainty against my credibility: someone definitely complained when it happened. Every time.

We have been having this very same argument for hundreds of years. One side always argues, and perhaps they are right, that to be human is to make progress, embrace technology and take the next step. Who the heck are you to stand up and say hold up a minute… not this time? Why is AI any different than the self-checkout, the ATM machine, the robotic assembly plant, the steam engine, the cotton gin?  Get out of the way of progress. We have forever in our long history built machines to save labour and time, and each has bumped humanity to the next step in our advancement as a species. Each has always replaced jobs and skills with technology. And society has moved on. We adapted. Why should artificial intelligence the point where we are supposed to hit pause? 

Not in my backyard, you are standing here shouting, is it not so?

Perhaps.

Perhaps the foolish among us are those who keep banging their own heads against the wall and expecting it to hurt less this time.

Perhaps it is true that have we reached such a state of inevitability that we should no longer seek to hone and refine and balance our course for the best possible outcome?  Perhaps this time we got it right? Perhaps this time the collision of our skulls with the brick will hurt less. I doubt it, but perhaps. 

Are we so certain this time that we have it so perfectly right that to question such progress is deemed treason to the fate of our fellow humans? There is no technology has been perfect in its first release. No shift in the social fabric of society has been gentle and harmless. Is it not the role of the elders of a culture to impart their experience to the next generation? To caution. To steady the hand upon the wheel. Is there not a ritual dance that must occur: those who arrived first offering advice to the next shift, and the next shift proclaiming loudly that they don’t need said advice, to get with the times, to keep up or get out of the way old man. The elders shrug off the objections, the youth forge ahead and stumble, the experienced pick them up, and two, and three, and step.

I am not seeking to stop the tidal wave of AI. But I do have some thoughts on its inevitable arrival. I may not know the deep internal workings of a large language model, but I have spent my life honing the very skills that those technologies seek to replicate in silicon. Having traversed my own mid-life, entered the final acts of my career, I have some advice.

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