“Aaaask Alan”

In the late ‘80s when my wife’s children were young and we first began dating, when an unusual question came up and I would know the answer, they’d say “Aaaaask Alan!” Everyone would laugh that I was the font of useless knowledge.

That actually used to happen to me a lot. Billie would ask me about a crossword clue and I’d know the answer. watching Jeopardy I would know the tough question that stumped all the contestant. People, in a social setting, would ask a question or wonder out lout and I would know the answer.

“Aaaask Alan.”

People would jokingly ask “How do you know this stuff?” and I would answer,

“Years of reading the rotogravure section of the Sunday paper.”

This rarely happens anymore. This may be because no one (including me) reads a hard copy Sunday paper, or knows what rotogravure means (description of the unique printing press for the color magazine insert). It may be my 75 year-old, deteriorating synapses limit access to the useless knowledge database.

Or it may be that “Aaaask Alan.” has been replaced. Now at a dinner party when anyone says “I wonder. . .” at least three smart phones  are whipped out and the race is on to see whose fingers are nimbler than Alan’s brain. Billie and I participate in this contest too, even when home alone, and when the answer springs forth, we say,

“Google – the death of wonder.”

Now when she asks me crossword clues, I don’t know the answers as often. I speculate how much of my growing trivia ignorance is from the loss of the color insert, and how much is decaying neurons in my brain.

Techno-erasing knowledge and skill

Nan Culler, my mother quit teaching high school math when I was eight (1956) and embarked on a new career as a computer programmer. My mother’s math skills were prodigious.

When I bought my first house, I worried I couldn’t afford the payments and she asked me the price, my down payment, the interest rate (8%) and the tax rate, and calculated my monthly payment,  thirty-year compound interest, in her head, to the penny. “You can afford it,” she said, ‘Now close your mouth; you’ll catch a fly.”

When I started using a calculator, she said, “Alan, don’t use those things; they rot your brain.” I didn’t listen. Occasionally now I catch myself dividing numbers by ten on the calculator on my phone. In business school I bought a fancy Hewlett Packard 37E financial calculator and now have to look up formulas for basic accounting ratios.

I drove a cab in 1969 in Boston and knew all the street names in the city, my suburb, and most towns in between. When I lived in London I was amazed at black cab drivers who knew most streets in the 300 page A-Z map book.

We didn’t own a car when we lived in New York City, but in 2008 moved to New jersey and bought maps, not realizing GPS adoption. We bought a Garmin. Now GPS is on our phones and on the car “Nav” system. I periodically catch myself using GPS to go where I know the way, and I know few street names.

Several years ago years ago at Christmas time we gave our then eight-year-old granddaughter the job of handing out the presents from under the tree. She picked up  a package and said “ I can’t do this. I can’t read cursive.” She’s almost twenty now and that’s changed, but I saw a video about a new service designing signatures and teaching cursive for your name to those who never learned.

Lost knowledge and skill isn’t new. I remember helping my father clean out his workshop in the 1970s. I found a canvas bag with four tools I didn’t recognize.

“Oh, those are the old Model T wheel tools,” my dad said. “This one is from that later model, a wire spoke straightener. This is a spoke shave for wooden spokes. This is a true-form for the 21” wheel rim.”

“An what’s this?” I said, holding up a weird small sledge hammer-hatchet combination.

“If you hit a hole and you had the wooden wheels, you had to cut a spoke from a tree branch. The mallet was for truing the wheel. I got to where I made and carried spare spokes. Then the wire wheels came out. Still needed the mallet and true-form.”

I wish I’d hung on to those tools as a symbol of knowledge and skills lost to new Technology.

Artificial Intelligence, a “hair-on-fire” moment

“ChatGPT, Google’s Deep Mind, AI is changing everything!” There is a story nightly on the nightly news that only people my age still watch. (At least we use the DVR and speed through all the drug commercials.)

OK, I admit that deep fakes in political ads are scary and I watched the “Terminator” movies so I have free-floating Anxiety about “SkyNet becoming aware and saving the earth from humanity.”

Tech companies invent things because they can and we should think about the unintended consequences of AI, but, call me crazy, I’m not sure it is worthy of the “hair-on-fire” news coverage right now.

Now anyone who knows me, a “late adopter “ with a dubious relationship with computers may be saying. “Alan is not the person to listen to on technology.”

Fair point. Take this with a grain of salt, but “Aaaask Alan,”  I’m going to opine anyway.

There are three complaints drawing media “ink” and airwaves at the moment,:

• AI will steal jobs.
• AI is stupid!
• AI will change everything in ways we can’t anticipate.

AI will steal jobs

Probably. All new technologies change jobs. Farhad Manjoo, the New York Times columnist wrote recently describing how AI will eliminate the need for basic computer programming, which was the job that was supposed to be safe in a digital world. “Learn to code” was what politicians told displaced workers.  Now AI is coding. Is that a bad thing? Yes, if you are a coal miner who just learned to code. Manjoo goes on to show how advanced coders are using AI to enhance their skills.

Does AI do a better job than people? Do those chat bots really replace a good CSR? Not in my experience, at least not now. Will Chat GPT replace all writers? Maybe the bad ones. (Hope that’s not me. Who decides?)

AI is stupid!

A story in Futurism.com complained how AI aided search came up with a parody of Vermeer’s painting “Girl with Pearl Earring”  instead of the real thing The girl in the painting found had lightbulbs for earrings. Horrors! Culture will be destroyed. Maybe if Vermeer were alive and considered the parody defamatory, he’d have a point, but AI is an infant.

New technologies take some time to get as good as the old or as human skills.

For years steel companies showed TV ads where a man first in overalls, later in a heat suit, controlled a bucket pouring molten steel to be rolled into sheet steel.

When I moved to Pittsburgh people still mourned the loss of the highest paid union job in the mill. The worker judged steel viscosity by the color and the feel of the heat and by the way it sloshed in the bucket. What could go wrong with that?

Many people died, before the mills replaced that job with computers. In the beginning the computers were stupid. It took five years for computers to get as good as a human..

AI will learn faster, but it’s going to be stupid for a while.

AI will change everything in ways we can’t anticipate

Another New York Times story told the tale of a lawyer who used AI to put together a brief. AI made up cases that didn’t exist to support his client’s case. The judge found out. Oops.

This may be an example of the stupidity of AI. Or it may be an example of the potential misuse of technology by people with bad intentions. The news has its “hair on fire” about “deep fakes,” exchanging faces and voices on photos and videos, to show people saying and doing things they never did.  Some twenty five-year-old made those for the news show. Scary.

Some people of bad intent may make themaand post them on social media spreading conspiracy theories and other misinformation to influence elections. More scary..

From my uniquely techno-incompetent point of view, we shouldn’t be concerned about the stupid AI. It will learn.

We should be slightly less concerned about lost knowledge and lost jobs. Knowledge gets lost. We are still trying to figure out how Stonehenge was built. Some programmers may be displaced, some people will forget how to compose a sentence, but the majority will figure out how to survive and the chosen will still make art that speaks to the human condition.

What we might want to think about is how to protect ourselves, our children, and our societies from people of bad intent. AI may be faster.. The stakes seem higher, but humanity has always tried to limit the damage of people of bad intent.

Let’s keep working on that.