Technology has been a part of our development since the very beginning of our lives. In my specific case, I remember that when I was a kid, I would sit for hours watching reruns of cartoons from the 70s, especially those by Hanna-Barbera that showed the type I life I wanted to have. Simple days full of adventures and cool stories made me feel like I was part of those families on the TV box. By the time I was 10 years old, my favorite shows on TV were the Jetsons and the Flintstones, two shows which had a lot of things in common between them even while being, according to my childhood understanding of time, a billion and a half years apart. In fact they had a lot in common with my own needs. I liked them because they showed that every day, and mundane tasks, were one day going to be done by some sort of gadget (mechanical or organic, it didn't really matter). Growing up, I really wanted to have living tools around the house doing all the hard work while making funny quips and constantly yapping about their efforts. I also wanted a flying screen that would accompany me hovering around my head when in school. I also wanted a dinosaur disguised as a bus that would pick me up to go to school and a flying saucer to go shopping with my mom, but mostly I wanted a bird to play my music records and a robot to take care of my every single need. Due to a very strict no pet policy by the homeowner of the place I grew up, the robot was the only way to go over that issue. I wanted a robot that had its own personality and will to help in every need, a friend and an assistant that would make my days better. Unfortunately, once the tv was off and I was back to reality, I had to face a hard truth: I had to be the one taking care of those needs. The future seemed way too impossible to achieve with all those advances and the Flintstones were a little bit less plausible due to the lack of speaking animals and the pet unfriendly building of my childhood. Then, when I was a little older, I watched the Terminator movies and understood that giving the machines too much power was not the best idea, especially if those machines had access to everything and could do it ten thousand times better than any human could. My fears were rational, because technology was too fancy for my understanding and The Matrix was too cool to be ignored. The machines were out to take over and rule.
Many years had passed, more screens and less cables were my new reality. RGB lights and smart devices were now an everyday occurrence and then, one day, I realized I had just asked my Alexa to set a reminder about a thing that we had going on a Zoom call. Suddenly, it hit me. I still didn't have a dinosaur pet, but apart from that we had long surpassed the Jetsons in more than one way. I had already reached the future I used to only dream about. Then, it hit me again. This is scary. Without even being fully aware of the change, many things had been either improved or even replaced by technology, and I thought about how technological evolution has been around us without question. We were already feeding info to Skynet and enjoying the Simulation. Nowadays, we already create art that surpasses the average artist with Ai image generation tools and we're capable of producing a pretty decent essay about any topic in seconds just by using the right prompt thanks to AI text generators. The thought hit me again, first as hope for improvement and the promise of a better life, then as a threat to my very own existence. Then again like a promise, and yet again as a clear and present danger about a change in the status quo and our lifestyle.
Will AI take over my job? Fear of new technology is not new
This got me thinking again, this is the first time we have been faced with this type of fear in a long time. The first true change came way before any of us were born, when information was a commodity that only those within certain groups had access to. Those were the times where the power of education divided people into classes and that marked the lifepath you'd have. Then, one day and out of nowhere (actually after a lot of trial and error and many many prototypes, but the story I'm telling here needed some human flare) Gutenberg gave us the printing press, an invention that was as simple as it was practical, and with that a cultural revolution which changed the way the world was spinning. The advent of the printing press enabled the sharing of knowledge, but still required a specialized operator. This change brought fear to many, as it seemed that oral traditions and the jobs of those who sang epic stories of the past would soon be lost to a machine that could simply put words onto paper. While the printing press was a significant innovation, it also caused fear among those who were not ready to embrace change and wished to maintain traditional methods.
The clock kept turning, and this invention proved to be a revolutionary enterprise, creating jobs and bringing the written word to the masses. Now, anyone could access information written by the greatest minds while at the same time, new concepts and ideas were being able to be transmitted over space and time. The fears were only that, fears.
Roll the calendar a few hundred years, and new creators were experimenting with the hopes of immediate and effective communication, which only came to be thanks to the books that were born from a little but crucial invention, the same one that at a certain point felt scary…
The next revolutionary device, the telegraph, gave us connectivity, and with this, the hopes of another revolution, this time allowing anyone to share their thoughts almost immediately over very long distances. It was like magic, or science. It was actually more like science fiction. The telegraph had become the next scary thing. If anyone could reach information, what were books going to be good for? The scary thought of losing what the press gave us was again looming around us. This was going to be the end of humanity.
A New Ally: How AI is Revolutionizing our Lives, Art and Writing
My dad was born on the 40s and he saw the technology jump from the analog world, full of cogs and wheels, to the digital era (he definitely blew some fuses as a kid and got some electric shocks while experimenting with radio waves in his basement) and later to the computer age, He was excited when he saw the internet be born and scared about the prospect of losing his job as a teacher to a really fancy multimedia version of Encarta. The early 2000s started to make this last stage of technological development more accessible and science fiction a closer and more plausible way to live. The Jetsons were starting to look less like a long term goal and more akin to one of the available (yet not fully accessible) options on the market. He had to reinvent himself and change his mindset from dials and buttons to mouse clicks and HTML. He was scared, but I can still find the website he created for his English classes. I guess that it is my turn to face a tech revolution and see the world be taken over (not on a Skynet / Terminator / The Matrix style) but by creative users who embrace the change and like those first great minds of the past, start to take advantage of those developments and are the pioneers who actually keep the tabs on the evolution of technology and shows us that we can go from a garbage eating piglike reptile under the sink to a robot assistant that helps us achieve the best version of ourselves?
Nowadays, ChatGPT came as a game changer for people looking for AI text generators, to the point of being banned and feared by teachers all over the world, as well as AI art generators such as Midjourney or Dall3 make great images while still making awkward mistakes that still make them easy to differentiate from the work of digital artists and can bring us great concepts. Scary, but at the same time a great tool for artists who can build up from the collaboration with an AI. Maybe novelists are getting scared of having their jobs taken away by an AI text generator, when actually they could train a language model to become a real-time imagination companion, a sort of magical familiar with whom to share ideas before jumping into the paper. You might be a little worried that the machines are getting ready to give us a surprise and make us obsolete, but don't worry. We are the creators who are ready to evolve and reinvent ourselves to master the new tools. By having access to the world's knowledge, we can be part of a cultural change that will help society take its next step forward. We are currently experiencing a shift in how things are done.
We are living a new shift on how things are done. Artificial intelligence is becoming a reality and I still watch the Jetsons, hoping for the invention of a rube goldberg machine that wakes me up, dresses me up, feeds me breakfast and tosses me into a self-driving car to go to my job. Or a pet dinosaur. You know something? I really want that pet dinosaur. I will ask ChatGPT for the best prompt I can use with Midjourney so I'll be able to create a new avatar for my social media
Good lord, this is so fun, yet so scary.
Follow us on social media below for more insightful content, news and tips.