Yesterday, my family and I went to see what is likely to be the final Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
It's not a bad ending for the franchise - plenty of action. Some one-liners. Nice cameos for Jonathan Rhys-Davies (Salla) and Karen Allen (Marian).
The vehicle, both literally and figuratively, is a device that actually does exist, the Antikythera mechanism, which was discovered for real in a shipwreck found in 1901. Now, the device is unlikely to have actually been constructed by Archimedes, but many consider it the first real computer. It could not do what the movie implied, but it was obviously way, way ahead of its time.
I have written a fair amount about technology - how it changes life, what the pitfalls as well as benefits for humanity are. Mainly, I think what tech does is enhance what we are capable of rather than changing our nature. With the rise of so-called "AI," and most notably and recently, Chat GPT, I was thinking about how the current young people cannot imagine a world without some of the inventions that are now more prosaic. Mobile telephones. Tablets. The internet.
As Gen-Xer, I would start by pointing out that the AI and the internet are technologies, much like others. And they obviously have had and will have a profound impact on life.
But are these changes more significant than others. More than, say, the automobile? The telephone?
My wife, son, and I during COVID began watching the television show Downton Abbey, and in Season 1, the manor house gets its first telephone. Everyone is mesmerized by it, save for the dowager mother of Lord Grantham, who views it with cynicism and suspicion.
The younger servants in the house (e.g., Thomas) could be said to be the “last generation to experience what life was like before the telephone.”
Every invention that came before us, to our conscious minds has always been there. My grandfather was born in 1908, so for him, although the airplanes became a routine device, it had not always been around, and it surely was not ubiquitous.
I can remember when I was first exposed to a computer (in 1981, an Apple II+). I clearly remember my first modem (a Hayes 300 baud device that you put the telephone receiver to, circa 1983). I can clearly remember trying to send documents via email using uuencode and uudecode. Then Stuffit, then WinZIP that did everything automatically. Then you could just drag and drop files into an email.
The internet has, more than any other of these inventions, had a massive impact on culture. My son is 16, and he simply cannot imagine the world without it. The idea of going to a library, sorting through a card catalog, getting books, and doing research that way is as odd to him as would be using a telegraph to me. Hell, he has never seen a real encyclopaedia, or had the thrill of waiting for the “update” that came every year in an extra volume to augment the now out-of-date information.
Almost everything he needs or wants to know, he can get in minutes from a tiny device that’s the size of an old Texas Instruments led calculator that I used to use.
That puts information at his disposal that 16 year old me could not dream of.
On the other hand, it also means less human connection. “Relationships” are often virtual. Friends are icons on a screen. I got a glimpse of this in graduate school, where one night, two people waiting for their simulations to converge (I got my degree in mathematics) were using a live chat whilst sitting at their SUN work stations.
They were sitting in the same room.
I thought it odd, and dysfunctional at the time. I couldn’t imagine things like WeChat or twitter then.
So something gained, and something lost.
We gain information, we lose human connection.
In short, it’s a Faustian bargain. Like all technology is. It’s up to us to use it wisely.
And finally, I do not accept the premise that it will never be the same again. The Romans at one point had engineering and technology that along the way got lost. It took humanity in some case centuries to learn back what was known.
It would be incredibly hubristic to think that we cannot fall to the same situation as they did.
