Confessions of a Former News Editor - It’s not the end of the world.....but it’s close
by Ryan Pugh
These days, there are a lot of people concerned about the future, but I’m not one of them because I saw what was coming a long, long time ago.
This past weekend, I went back to the tiny little hamlet of Bradford for my college’s annual alumni weekend and going back there for the first time in quite a few years got me thinking about the classes I took in my time there and one of those classes I took was called the American Dream of Success which led me to be woke (as the kids say or said, I can never keep track) about the future.
The American Dream of Success was one of my favorite classes in college. I took it in my last semester in college when I only needed six credits (two classes), but to get financial aid, I needed 12 credits (four classes), so I decided to steer into the skid and take 18 credits (six classes) because why not? So, four of the six classes I took were classes I wanted to take, and one of those classes was the American Dream of Success. First off, it was taught by one of my favorite professors in college, Dr. Vincent T. Kohler. Dr. Kohler, or Vince, as he preferred to be called (which was hard for a guy like me who, to this day, still refers to my former teachers as Mr. or Mrs. if I see them out somewhere, was a brilliant man who taught me a lot about life in the several classes I took with him. It’s because of Vince I still have about, 90-percent, of my textbooks from college because he once told us a craftsman keeps his tools, and as an academic, those books are our tools for life.
One of the books we read in that class was called “Player Piano,” which was written by Kurt Vonnegut. It was Vonnegut’s debut novel, and he released it in 1952. Once I started reading that novel, I couldn’t put it down and finished it in a few days. The book is centered around a fictional town of Ilium, N.Y., in a dystopian future where the machines basically run society (sound familiar?) Anyway, the head of the corporation becomes distrustful of the machines and joins an underground group fighting the machines, and well, – not to spoil the ending –the machines ended up winning in the end.
It was after reading said book that I became hypersensitive to how much the world had changed since the invention of the computer. When I started school in the fall of 1979, we didn’t have a computer in our school (we didn’t even have a photocopier. Ah, the smell of that blue mimeograph ink. I imagine someday there will be a class-action lawsuit over the exposure we Gen-Xers had to that likely toxic stuff) and by the time I graduated college in 1997, I could do thousands of things with a computer include surf the internet. Glancing back at it, it seemed like such a quaint time.
But I was coming to realize that computers had increased in speed and memory exponentially just in my lifetime, and I thought, what happens when they start not needing humans to program them, and when they could program themselves? Now we are right in the middle of 2026, and if you hadn’t noticed, that pesky A.I. (artificial intelligence) is getting to a point at which it is beginning to learn on its own. The reason I know the A.I. threat is real is that recently, many of the higher-ups at tech companies –including Bill Gates – have basically come out and said we need to slow the proverbial A.I. train down.
But it’s coming, eventually. I knew about it back in 1997, and I tried to talk to my friends about it. And they all thought I was a crackpot. But here we are.
My advice is to basically accept that we are hurdling towards an automated world because fighting it is pointless.
The other day, I was talking to a young man who is currently in flight school, learning to be a pilot in hopes of someday flying for a commercial airline. And I said to him that someday his job would become obsolete because of A.I. He recoiled in shock, saying that there is “no way anyone would fly in a plane being flown without a pilot.” And I responded, “Are you sure about that? Because I’m pretty sure 30 years ago, climbing in a car with no driver would have been unthinkable to most of the population.” I explained to him that the more A.I. encroaches into our lives, the more it becomes accepted. He scoffed at me and walked away. Ah, not the first time I’ve been scoffed at.
The one piece of A.I. I am excited to see is when all cars are driverless, and I never have to navigate a convenience store parking lot ever again. The space between the fuel islands and the entrance to the store can be best described as “Thunderdome” because it’s almost impossible to follow any traffic laws in that asphalt and concrete wasteland, where you take your life in your hands if you choose to leave your car at the pump to go visit the restroom. It’s like pit road at the Indianapolis 500 if everyone at the old Brickyard was drunk. So yes, whenever KITT or KITT’s great-grandson is driving me around (KITT is the automated, talking car from the 1980s TV show “Knight Rider”), I’ll be happy.
Until next time.
