Right now, in my house, I have two disruptive technologies. This doesn’t scare me at all, despite all the hype. Only one of them actually gets the hype, actually.
AI is the one that gets the hype, with headlines shouting, “AI Will Destroy Humanity!” I have Stable Diffusion installed on my Linux box, which was a bit of a chore. It certainly didn’t leap out of the Internet and take over my computer all by itself. Now that my new computer is up to the mark (the old one wasn’t) I can produce lots of images until I get one I like. Since I can’t afford to pay thousands of dollars for a professional artist to do images for my books, I’m experimenting with using it for my book covers.
There are other authors out there who are experimenting with using ChatGPT to produce text, such as blog posts and emails, and even books. I’m not among them, and I won’t be. I enjoy the creative process and I can express my own opinions for myself, thank you very much.
AI is where personal computers were in the ’80’s. It’s new, and a game-changer, and it is moving into a lot of areas. There is the same wailing and gnashing of teeth about the human jobs that are being displaced, too. Funnily enough, I notice a pattern that I’ve seen before (old guy, here). What’s being automated is the routine and well understood stuff. Creative work, which needs analytical and problem solving skills, isn’t being talked about, and the angst isn’t coming from those folks.
I can see some other applications that are going to cause some angst, too. For example, one of the constants of police officers around the world is paperwork – datawork in these days. Everything has to be documented, in detail, because you don’t know what’s important until it’s important. A single report may not be important in itself, but enough reports can give a crime analyst (me, back in the day) material to predict the next crime. If the officer can just feed his notes into an AI as a text prompt, and have a properly formatted, spell-checked report in seconds, that will get him back on the street and on to the next call that much sooner.
There will be people who will consider that a bad thing. They don’t want police officers being active out on the street, for their own ideological reasons. They’re going to complain, once they catch the drift.
Along that line, there are a lot of areas of law enforcement where AI’s could automate the routine stuff. For example, judges have a lot of hearings which are boringly mundane and don’t strain their abilities much at all. Should J. Repeat Offender, who has a long history of showing his middle finger to his bail conditions and has committed violent crimes while out on bail before, be granted bail? That decision doesn’t even require AI.
Again, that will provoke opposition. The current system is creaking under the strain, so eventually there will have to be new solutions to these old problems. We shall see.
That’s one area. There will undoubtedly be others. I’m not getting in a sweat about it. I’ve seen these revolutions before, I’ve weathered them and benefited by them. When I first came into the intelligence community, databases were maintained on paper and kept in file cabinets. Maintaining said databases was a lot of work, and not very inspiring, either. Most especially, mustering the classified books was a pain of the first magnitude. When they were transferred to CD, instead of checking every single page of a book the size of an encyclopedia, you could just make sure all the CD’s were in the rack. Done.
Computer networks were the next revolution. Enormously greater access to information, delivered at light speed across national boundaries half way around the world. I had to learn new skills, how to drink selectively from the fire hose and sort out what was relevant to me and the people I advised. I also had to learn about databases, how they worked, how to use them to the best effect. There were always new problems, and coming up with creative solutions to them was a day at the office. I never went short of work, ever.
The other disruptive technology that sits in my man cave is a 3D printer. For some reason, it doesn’t get nearly the hype that AI does, but it’s potentially just as disruptive. There is a huge network of companies that produce all sorts of small plastic items for any number of purposes.
The other day I wanted a couple of shelf brackets to put up a plant. Mundane enough, to be sure. I looked around several hardware stores and didn’t find anything I wanted. The new technology gave me another option I’d never had before. I did a search on Thingiverse, found a design I liked, tossed it over to the printer. A couple of hours later, there they were.
The next step was to learn something new. To design something for 3D printing requires knowing how to use a CAD program, which I’m in the process of doing. I settled on OpenSCAD, from a variety of free choices, and I’m quite enjoying it.
The other lesson here is that the printer isn’t a magic machine. It requires tending, calibration, troubleshooting. The real world is a lot more demanding than the inside of a computer.
Some company that makes shelf brackets didn’t get the business, and the stores didn’t get the business either. The shipping company that would have brought it from China didn’t get that business, either. Multiple companies are cranking out those machines by the thousands, and they’re cheap and getting better all the time. New research is ongoing, too. It will get better, faster and cheaper. Looks pretty disruptive to me.
There are social implications there, too. Police forces are already encountering “ghost guns”, produced on consumer grade printers with the addition of a few vital metal bits that are easy to come by and not regulated. Gun control has never been easy, and it’s about to get harder.
I don’t see any headlines about the end of manufacturing. I guess the doomsayers haven’t caught the drift yet.
I write science fiction, so that means I have to keep up with the present in order to write about the future. I enjoy it.
Another factor that the doomsayers are good at ignoring is the population decline. The new generations coming up are a lot smaller than the ones in the 20^th^ Century. Countries like Japan are worried to the point that it’s a political and social issue. How do you persuade people to have children? Having raised two myself, I can attest that it’s not easy. Automating routine stuff, both information and real world, will have to be done if our civilisation is to survive. Somebody has to do the work, and there will be fewer people to do it. Technologies such as AI are what we called in the military ‘force multipliers’. They allow one person to get more done.
Heinlein’s famous quote gave a long list of things a competent human being should know, ending with the admonition, “Specialisation is for insects.” If you want to survive and prosper among these revolutions, get competent. Polish the meta-skills, like problem-solving. Get a wide skill set across a lot of areas. Learn something every day. When the area you work in gets disrupted, be ready to surf the wave.
I’ve done that for all my adult life, and I have prospered thereby. To the younger generation, go thou and do likewise.
Those who read my books will notice that I write about people who do exactly that. Not a coincidence, at all.
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