A son’s newspaper column of 14 August 2024, Daddy Days: Being the dad of a teenager (https://www.statesman.com/story/news/local/pflugerville/2024/08/14/daddy-days-being-the-dad-of-a-teenager/74795047007/ ) Almost talked me off this ledge, but when I searched the buggy whip story to find out where I first had read it, I found the Internet knew all about this, and so did every businessman and business graduate. I even got closer to the edge of the ledge when at last I went to Logos Bible Software in hopes of making my Northwestern Publishing 1997 CD of the Lutheran Confessions useable.
Seeing this site was like the first time Star Wars revealed the uncountable number of Storm Troopers. There was no music but I heard that ominous, building, marching rhythmic sound when I saw how complete, how thorough, how big you could make your Logos Library…up to 10,000 dollars’ worth of tech (Get it today for just over 5 grand! It trumpeted. What a deal.).
First, the Buggy Whip Salesman. It’s the analogy of a man right before the car goes into mass production who orders a big shipment of buggy whips convinced that the automobile is a fad. Here I am still buying books, still reading books, even still trying to write them, and AI can do that faster and in some sense “better”.
You know the joke that the lottery is a tax on people who are poor at math? That might be what’s going on here. I’m blowen away by exponential growth, economies of scale, and many other numerical marvels. I remember the first time a teacher showed us what starting with a penny and doubling the amount of money you have every day did. Cue the Star Wars’ scene and pan the camera.
Next comes the 1983, Superman III¸ where Richard Pryor gets rich by gathering the fractions of pennies left over when interest is being credited to accounts. I had never thought about all those fractions adding up. AI tells me – who better to answer this than a machine – that 5.45 billion people use the internet. If everyone just sent 1 person a penny…. Well, you do the math.
I might not just be a buggy whip salesman in 1905. I may be the AI racing the IH in 1868. That’s American Indian racing the Iron Horse, i.e. locomotive. It’s a stock sad scene in Oaters. Or even more tragic, I might be the equivalent of John Henry, an African American steel driver, who dueled a steam-powered drill and beat the machine but died doing so circa 1870.
Big Blue wins now at chess. Pastors are using AI to write sermons and lay people are listening to them. Here I sit with a warehouse full of buggy whips, thinking of challenging AI in a thinking match, ready to be pounded into the ground.
My sense of being overwhelmed may be more FOMA a term I never knew was a thing till listening to millennials 10 years ago. Social Media amplifies the standard teen whine to his mom, “But EVERYONE is doing it!” It amplifies it way beyond proportion. You don’t just think the bandwagon is leaving. You hear, see, taste it.
A 1936 article, “The Literary Twenties – The Young Generation” was written by Carl Van Doren when he was 51. In part he says, “The rebellion against old manners was merely a widespread unrest, with no focus but in literature. It was like the unrest of any young generation except that it was now easier than it would once have been for the restless to learn how numerous they were, and so conspire” (Gentlemen, Scholars, and Scoundrels, 240).
If that was true in the early 20th century, think how exponentially easier it is not only to “learn how numerous they were” but multiply that by bots, tech farms, and AI? And if the young in 1920’s America were thought to be able to conspire by means of at best a telephone and more likely print media, how fast can this be done with any of the social media platforms? Instantly everyone knows what the thought of the day, really moment by moment, is supposed to be.
It’s like all the science fiction written about how dangerous the interface between man and machine can be was never written. Spock never showed the weakness of only thinking and never emoting; Data never sped read all of the Federation’s database in a few eyeblinks or broke down a steel door like it was cardboard. Obi-Wan isn’t winning this battle; Darth is.
When it all comes crashing down, when AI is given the problem that loops it back on itself perpetually, when it’s locked into puzzling over the statement: “Everything written on this piece of paper is a lie”, come see me. I’ll have buggy whips, books, paper, and pencils. We can draw up plans for a flying car….That’s only 20 years away, you know.
