Between school years at Wharton, i spent the summer of 1982 (that is about forty-years ago for you non mathematicians) working for the head of the Basic Energy Sciences program at the Department of Energy.  It was recession time, jobs were not readily available, so my old boss gave me a job for the summer.  What was the job?

It was to spend the summer examining a new technology called "microcomputers".  1982 for those of you don't know was pre-Microsoft, pre IBM PC, pre-pretty much everything except for a rather weak (in today's terms) set of software.  I don't even know who made the microcomputer that i was given to explore.  There was a spreadsheet software, called Visicalc, which let you do about 40 rows and 10 columns.  The database software was DBase, and it allowed you 32 data elements (no more).  It also had wordprocessing something if i remember called Wordsoft or something like that (it was just a step above the typewriters which our secretaries (yes, we had secretaries to do much of the tedious administrative work of typing, filing, answering telephones).  Email did not come until later.

At the end of the summer i wrote a report for my boss, which essentially said that everyone in the office should have one of these on their desks.  I was not shy in my praise for this new capability because i was working around a bunch of "top notch" scientists.  The report made its way up the chain, but when it got to DOE's IT department, they stopped it--saying that there needed to be more control over data and that microcomputers on everyone's desk would simply be chaos.

Later, in the early 1990s, the internet came along, and people were saying the same thing about that.  How in the world could you trust the internet?  Well, yes part of that is true, but i doubt if there is anyone reading this post that would want to give up access to it.

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Fast forward to 2023 and AI.  Everyone needs to have AI at their fingertips.  AI is not going to replace humans, it is going to make humankind better.  AI is smart, but not necessarily smarter than a smart human who uses it.  I will jump at getting my subscription once i get passed the "cell phone" problem that i have.  I saw how i could use AI just from the two early queries that my Georgetown lawyer friend (who used to work for me at PricewaterhouseCoopers) ran for me.

She said she had a friend that asked AI to write something up for professional use.  She said he had to go through about 7 or 8 iterations before he was satisfied with the end result.  That is how AI will be used.

Although i will say that i was blown away by the two responses that i got to my AI questions, but i will also say that i was not completely satisfied either.  There were things that i knew that AI didn't know (admitting the reverse was probably true at the same time).  My point is this.  AI is a tool, not a replacement.  No more so than microcomputers and their accompanying software were back in 1982.

Yeah, scream and yell at me all you want.  Tell me that AI is only in its infancy and sooner or later it will take over the universe (meaning Earth).  Tell me that humans will no longer have a role to play and we might as well extinct ourselves right now.  Remember HAL in the movie 2001.  HAL (by the way if you didn't know it got its name from IBM--taking the letter preceding the letters in IBM in each case--i.e. H before I, A before B, and L before M).

I have heard all that before and guess what?  Instead of being our downfall, technology led us to unfathomed productivity increases that led us to globanomics.

My advice is don't sit on the sidelines.  Make use of AI while you can.  Learn from it.  Learn how to make it work better for you.  You can always pull the plug, if you think it has taken you over.

Maybe i don't have as much to risk being 75 years old, but this old timer is not going to get scared away from this new technological marvel.

In fact, AI has given me new enthusiasm to "post", while i patiently await the implementation of the real "globanomics"--not AI's current view toward globanomics.

Screw Elon Musk--who some think is the "smartest human on the planet".  If he was really smart, he would be using AI in all of his professions.