The AI Revolution

What is real?

Hello from Anita!

Photo by Bryan Dickerson on Unsplash

We live in farm country. The hills and pastures surrounding us were mostly peach groves back when the German settlers made their truce with the Comanche. Now it’s vineyards and tasting rooms.

The earliest settlers worked their fields with a plow and maybe an ox, planting a single acre by hand. Tilling the soil, dropping the seeds, covering them over: roughly forty hours of backbreaking work per acre. Then came the tractor. What used to take a week could be done before lunch. Some farmers were slow to recognize the value of this strange new machine. But it didn’t take long before everyone had one, because if you didn’t, you couldn’t compete.

Other inventions have come along since then, each arriving faster than the last. It’s hard to keep up.

Apple’s MacIntosh

I remember the wonder of our first computer — a blue iMac with a black-and-white screen. I thought it was strange that somebody had taken a bite out of the logo. Our daughter was about thirteen. She was the one who, twenty some years later, called to say, “Mom, you can’t believe what these new iPhones can do.” That was around 2009, and she was right. What would any of us do without texting? GPS? Email in the palm of our hands? Most of us have quietly forgotten our own children’s phone numbers. We can’t drive across town without a robot telling us where to turn.

Now she drives a Tesla. Chuck won’t get in it because he’s afraid the battery will catch fire and he won’t be able to get out. He could be right — an old tractor fire killed my uncle when he was a child. Yet, Chuck cheerfully climbs on his own tractor with a lit cigar and not a second thought, not to mention sitting behind a gasoline powered engine when he runs to town in the Dodge pickup.

I’ve given up pointing this out to him.

I’m counting on that Tesla as my ticket to freedom when the kids eventually want to take away my car keys. ( If I can figure out how to touch the right screens ) By then, I won’t much care who’s tracking me.

But seriously: technology is moving faster than one of Elon Musk’s heavy-lift rockets. Since ChatGPT launched in late November 2022, that company has zipped from one billion to over 850 billion dollars in value and racked up more than 900 million users. The stock market is in a frenzy. The numbers have gotten so large they’ve broken the ordinary math of millionaires and billionaires. We’re deep in the era of the trillion.

It’s hard to know what is real anymore.

We were sitting on the porch this morning, sipping coffee and trying to make sense of all sorts of Artificial Intelligence, when a hummingbird shot past the red feeder. The dogs were locked onto a distant turkey.

I breathed in the morning air.

“All this AI stuff is really cool.” I commented. “But sitting on this porch drinking coffee with you, that’s real.”

Chuck opened one of the Bibles I like sometimes, to Ecclesiastes 11. He read it in “The Message,” which he thinks is heresy since it’s not the King James, but it cuts right to the bone:

The words of the wise prod us to live well.

They’re like nails hammered home, holding life together.

They are given by God, the one Shepherd.

The last and final word is this:

Fear God. Do what he tells you.

— Ecclesiastes 12:11–13, The Message

Good enough for the wisest and richest man who ever lived. Good enough for me.

The hummingbird came back around. The dogs gave up on barking at the turkey when a deer wandered by. Chuck poured a second cup.

Some things don’t need a trillion-dollar valuation to matter.

What is most real in your life? I love to hear from you!

Let a friend know you were thinking of them.