Fireside Chat
Let’s cut through the techno-static
to explore AI’s impact on your life
– human to human –
Enjoy keeping up as AI and technology
change our lives
The sheer pace of AI and technology is breathtaking. It’s not just the jargon stew of algorithms and robotics, it’s the inevitable change forced on our everyday lives, raising some, leaving others behind. How can we understand and adjust? This blog, written by a senior for seniors, offers thoughts, briefings and answers in plain language – an enjoyable kind of ‘Guardian meets fireside chat’.
When I look back, I don’t see the digital age starting in the 1940s. Yes, it arguably did, but for me it started in the early 1980s when my first computer, a BBC Micro plugged into my TV screen, replaced my Olympia portable and the dreadful industrial typewriters I used all through the 1970s as a reporter at the London Evening News.
While older members of my generation — the Silent Generation — struggled with technology changes, I loved digital technology from the first moment I touched a computer. My work productivity (time vs output) took off with the luxury of making changes without retyping. The pain in my finger joints vanished for the first time in years.
It wasn’t long after that introduction that Britain was caught in the power of the digital wave sweeping the world. Rupert Murdoch built his newspaper fortress at Wapping in east London and sparked violent protests over devastating job losses. A dramatic moment at the start of massive social and industrial changes driven by technology.
I think of those times now when I confront our new technology revolution. They seemed pretty dramatic at the time but, with hindsight, they were like a slow-motion car crash compared with the lightning speed of today’s technological revolution. AI, far beyond the hype and the fearmongering, is flooding into our lives and changing so much. It is inevitable. It is unstoppable. Put simply, we need to stay with the flow as it affects us or get left behind.
Let’s put that into perspective. You don’t have to understand how an aircraft works. That’s for the specialists, the engineers. You do need to understand its social development to have the option of making it part of your life.
This is all important, but there is something else too. Our emotional connection to the real changing world, aka happiness or lack of. How we react, in comfortable optimism or fear or confused rejection.
This blog aims to put change into useful perspective. Please join me on this journey into the future. I’ll smooth out bumps mostly but, if there are potholes to swerve round, I’ll point them out. Human to human in a digital world forecast to be 90% AI written, spoken and filmed within a year or two.
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