New technology scares the life out of some people while others welcome it. In January 2023, I wrote about Artificial Intelligence AI and its possible good and bad effects on writers, marketers and creative people in general. Some new technology scares the life out of me too. However, I recognize that some new tools can make my life easier.
In the two generations spanned by my father’s life (born 1914) and mine, the world has gone from predominantly animal and steam-powered transport of passengers and freight to space travel, AI and electric-powered small vehicles.
During my lifetime, I have experienced traveling on one of the first passenger jets – the ill-fated Comet. Fortunately it stayed in the air long enough to get my mother, my brother and me from Salisbury, Rhodesia to London, England in 1960. A journey that then required 2 re-fuelling stops and took most of a day. Thanks to advances in aircraft design, that journey was down to a non-stop 9 hour flight by the late 1990s and thanks to political chaos in Southern Africa is now a much longer two-stage flight via other countries in the 2020s.
Fortunately for my generation of early baby boomers, we completed our schooling without the benefit of computers, smartphones or calculators. At my school, written work had to be completed using an ink pen, no ballpoints. Fortunate because we had learned the skills to work things out in “old-fashioned” ways through mental effort and logical reasoning. But still young enough to ride the wave of new technology. A wave that launched programmable calculators, personal computers and the Internet.
New Technology That Scares The Life Out Of Me
In this category for me are: digital id, digital currency, smart cities aka 15-minute cities, and anything that allows more surveillance, more vehicle or personal tracking, and internet censorship. I also have great concerns for modified medicines that are launched on an unsuspecting public before being thoroughly tested.
New Technology That I Welcome
Despite the list of things that scare me in the paragraph above, I am not a Luddite and I happily use many of the tools that new technology provides.
Riding on the wave of developments that started in the 1980s, I was the first manager in the large corporation where I worked, to get an IBM PC for my use and a fax machine for my secretary. Both were very expensive items by today’s standards and the PC had a fraction of the memory or power of a modern smartphone. Those were the days of floppy disks and frustrations.
Image by MasterTux from Pixabay
To produce, edit and publish two episodes a week (audio and video) for my podcast, I use many digital tools that have only recently been developed. Zoom for video interviewing and recording. And a number of editing, transcribing, graphics creation, curating, scheduling and database applications including AI.
Apart from my creative activities, with my farming background, I see huge merit in using drones, livestock management programs, GPS systems for precision land preparation, crop planting and harvesting and much more.
Where To From Here?
At age 72, I have to ponder how much further I can ride this wave of new technology. At what point will the effort of learning how to use new tools outweigh the benefit I will get from using them? I have just installed a new database and series of automations using Airtable for our podcast The Yakking Show, I really enjoyed the learning and figuring-things-out process, so I think I still have a long ride left in me.
What will the world look like when my sons reach my age? Or my grandchildren?
Will they be controlled by the dark side of new technology? Or happily using the tools that benefit them?
What do you think?
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I think it is exciting to discover that our brains were already wired for the future, from the time of our birth.