First a note: May 2026 was not the first month in decades that I failed to post alaBlog here. Some of you saw it. After our ISO and R2 audits have passed, at some point I'll republish from "revert to draft". More on that specific existential task later. Google analytics stuff.
And on that topic, here is how I'm presenting AI to my staff, colleagues, and friends. With an analogy all my own, no assistance here. No AI editor.
In 1992, when I was hired as the youngest Recycling Program Manager tbda Deputy Division Director at MA DEP in Boston, there was a DOS computer upgrade in progress. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts was in the process of upgrading computers and monitors from green-screen monochrome Caldera DOS generation (will try to remember the word and spreadsheet programs, pre Office...) computers, used mostly for inter-office emails. Many staff would print all of their emails as backup - the "paperless office" was a laughing point then.
I'm a little hazy on what was available for "the internet" then, but I know people were talking about it. Staffer Bob Whitcher (a lowly Republican "political favor appointee" as described by my Dukakis managers) took me to an early internet cafe where they were trying to DSL an America OnLine (AOL) page. Bob was describing this to me as the "future", something that would have an incredible effect on the entire economy. We left before the page loaded. I both understood that Bob was an incredibly undervalued teammate, and at the same time saw that for this particular moment, internet was hype.
I'm also rusty on how exactly I did the research and gathered the data for my first big splash that year, the paper I wrote "Value Added By Recycling Industries in Massachusetts". It was to me a pretty obvious and non-political paper, just showing that recycling's success was not to be measured by the price of scrap at the local recycling depot if tens of thousands of jobs were at recycled paper, metal and glass mills that depended on the feedstock, and made products in competition with virgin material use factories near subsidized natural virgin resources...
Years later, I was able to use the same logic and research skills to present the view of reuse of electronics from the perspective of buyers of the early MA DEP computers from Indonesia (photo from my son there this week), Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, etc. I hadn't driven a truck to those locations, they weren't like the local paper mills adding value on Massachusetts. But like the recycling economy being bashed as "subsidized" which was laughable during the General Mining Act of 1872, the purchase orders for used devices published on Recycle.net lined up with the values offered under Silicon Sam Wasserman's RepairFAQ.
The internet was indispensible to me, to this blog. And AI is probably going to be bigger than the internet, because it will be able to harness Calipari's Powers of Persuasion (another Bob Whitcher introduction).
Carleton College freshman year's philosophy professor David Sipfle made a comment one morning which has always stuck with me. That true genious is often the ability to see an elegant and simple solution behind a complex and overburdened explanation. The simplicity of Copernicus' mathematics, when he imagined the earth and planets revolving around the sun, as compared to Ptolemy's earth-centric equations - was a great example of Occam's Razor.
So how I explain AI's importance to folks, like junior managers and staff at Good Point Recyclng, or colleagues in the WR3A, is that it feels like the internet in the early 1990s. There was definitely a point when the hype in the press could be made fun of as the hissing power-hungry PCs flickered feverishly to present an AOL homepage. But in the next 5 to ten years, the managers at MA DEP who did not embrace and use the internet were to be abandoned on an island with each other. Those of us who used and embraced it were promoted, made important policy impacts, and rose to a much greater field of vision.
Today, my ability to do research on the internet is about as important as printing out backup emails. That is how much faster and new this perspective is. Will the Genie remain subservient? And if the whole normal moral curve of society, from ISIS to Nobel Prize Winner, from Mala to Porn Magnate, all have their own Private Incredible Subservient and Sociopathic Genies, where is this headed? Who gets the Genie at the top of the pyramid, with the master switch? And how will our freedom and social income be meted out?
No comments:
Post a Comment