“Back in My Day”: Watching for Cycles
I'm in my late 40s. I'm the very tail end of Gen-X, so I've been through a few tech revolutions.
I remember reading articles by serious photographers saying that they would never use digital cameras, because the quality was too low, and they lost the “soul” of photography, that the darkroom would never be equaled as a creative space.
I remember reading articles by serious musicians saying that they would never use digital music formats, because the quality was too low, and they lost the “soul” of music, chopping it up into small slices.
I remember when the creator of JavaScript apologized for creating JavaScript and serious developers said they would never use it, because the quality was too low, and prototypical object orientation would never have the precision of classical (i.e. Class-based) object orientation.
And here's the thing.
They Weren't Wrong...At the Time
I remember very pixelated 1 megapixel digital photos. I remember .mp3 files that were optimized to be downloaded over dial up internet. I remember JavaScript being a resource intensive monster that made browsers slow and was only used for intrusive advertising.
But they are wrong now.
Digital photography has not removed the soul of photography. Photographers can now get into the art without spending thousands on film and darkroom chemicals that must be replaced frequently. The art is now available to so many people that never had a chance to get into it before.
Music is now available to everyone. “Lossless” codecs like .flac are sampled far more continuously than any human could ever understand, and even modern .mp3 files, encoded at high bitrates and with intelligent compression algorithms, are good enough to fool even “experienced” audiophiles.
JavaScript runs the world as we know it. Your browser is a computer for all intents and purposes, as evidenced by the proliferation of Browser-only or Browser-forward computers like Chromebooks.
Watch AI
People have legitimate complaints about AI. The models are trained on information that should have been protected by copyright. The models often hallucinate, making up answers that sound good but aren't. People who are saying that AI is a mess right now aren't wrong...right now.
But this has the earmarks of a technology that is going to stick around. This makes a lot of things easier for a lot of people so that the barrier to entry into many fields is lower. This is more like the internet: it's providing a way to reach farther than we can reach on our own.
Is it great right now? No. But nothing is this early on. Writing it off, saying “I will never use AI” is putting yourself into a very dangerous position, allowing yourself to be passed by and having to play catch up when it finally gets good.