My granddaughter Sara interviewed me for a college assignment. She wanted to know about the revolutionary changes I’ve experienced in my eight and a half decades on earth, things like computers and Artificial Intelligence (AI). At 18, Sara sees change as pretty sudden. At 85, I see it as more gradual, an “evolution” rather than a revolution.
ENIAC, the first programmable, general-purpose, digital computer, went to work in 1945, but designs for working computers date back to at least 1823, when Charles Babbage designed his Analytical Engine and Ada Lovelace wrote the “software” for it. It couldn’t be built back then, because the necessary precision just wasn’t possible, but when it was finally constructed 175 years later, it worked perfectly.
AI is all the rage nowadays, so it was, of course, at the forefront of our interview. Although we tend to think of it as a recent invention, in reality, it isn’t recent at all. The idea is there in Homer’s Iliad, wherein he described mechanical attendants that could independently learn new skills and use them to help the gods do their work. Homer didn’t know he was creating AI, but his idea stayed around. It’s what author Malcolm Gladwell calls a “sticky idea.” Most, maybe even all, important changes start with sticky ideas.
AI, of course, depends on computers. In 1945, ENIAC held roughly 18,000 vacuum tubes, weighed more than 60,000 pounds and occupied over 1,500 square feet. I never owned an ENIAC. But a quarter century later, computers that did useful work had become small enough to sit on people’s desks, and by 1975, they were seemingly popping up everywhere. Tandy, Amiga, Apple — countless companies were selling little computers at prices people could afford. Computing went viral. In Gladwell’s terms, it had reached a “tipping point.” I got my first computer in 1986. As a part-time university instructor, I had access to the internet before it was open to the public, even before most people heard of it. This internet was primitive compared to what we take for granted today, but working AI was already over 40 years old. I hadn’t heard about it yet, but some people in Silicon Valley were hard at work on it, picking up on theories that went back to mid-1930s England.
In fact, simple AI has been around the internet almost since there has been an internet. Think early chatbots. Most of us hated those first bots and considered them artificial stupidity rather than intelligence. But at the beginning of this decade, we started hearing about a new kind of AI, about programs that, once created, could learn on their own and, just like Homer’s automatons, become more competent by using what they learned. They could make sound judgments. They could do things that people do, but much faster and often better. Then, on Nov. 30, 2022, ChatGPT was released to the public.
I first used this new AI a little over a year later. Age-Friendly Carbondale had collected what, to us, was a huge amount of data about Highway 133 when, suddenly, the guy who had volunteered to help us organize, understand, analyze and make it presentable decided he had too much to do. We were overwhelmed. When my grandson suggested AI, we decided to try it. Why not? If AI was threatening to replace people, maybe that guy could be one of those people. We turned to ChatGPT, and ChatGPT delivered. Once we learned how to use it, it did in minutes what would have taken us weeks if not months. It even guided us to use it more effectively. We finished our research project on time, and we were influential in the Board of Trustees’ 2024 decision to speed up construction of two signalized bike/pedestrian crossings on the highway. One of them is already there. The second will be finished this summer. Thank you, Homer!
At the beginning of 2024, our use of AI was still somewhat novel. Three years later, AI is built into every internet browser, and I’m using it routinely. It helped me with the research for this article, just as it helps me with almost everything I write. Three years. It seems revolutionary, but it’s not. The theory is a century old, and the concept is Homeric. Like all changes, AI is evolutionary. It just looks revolutionary when you first learn about it — when it reaches its tipping point.
When Sara turned in her assignment, one of her professor’s comment was, “Your grandfather sounds smart!” I’d like to believe that, but more relevant here, I think, is the perspective that comes with age. Live through enough changes, and you begin to appreciate the time and effort they took.
Mature Content is a monthly feature from Age-Friendly Carbondale.