AI has changed everything.

In my teens, computers were budding into usable technology. I traded my Sega Master System for a 286 computer with a 40MB hard drive to play Eye of the Beholder. It wasn’t long before I realized I needed an upgrade, and I bought a 486 on credit with 4MB of RAM and a 200MB drive! I upgraded to 8MB of RAM to play Ultima VIII: Pagan and hit the big time while breaking the bank.

My early computing experiences were a magical time filled with wonder, BBSes, and constant learning. Then the Internet arrived on the scene and blew my mind.

Shortly after using Compuserv, then AOL, I found the promised land of a dial-up shell account with SunOS, a raw tcsh interpreter, and zero dotfiles. I didn’t need a stinking GUI to use gopher, NNTP, HTTP, IRC, and all the other magical Internet protocols! I was a hacker! I was part of the elite! I was in heaven.

Fast forward to 2023, and AI has turned me into a cliff note. Already, AI can pass advanced exams that would take me months of study, critical thinking skills & deep knowledge to pass. It can produce a novel and write about complex philosophical problems in seconds.

It’s humbling.

Astonishingly, what many people toil over for a living is now a few keystrokes away. Entire industries are in the process of displacement, including some roles in the software industry. Programmers thought we were irreplaceable, and the great ones still are, but many will become obsolete through AI automation.

AI is Old News

I’ve used Grammarly since May 2020, GitHub Copilot before its release in October 2021, and started using Wordtune this year. These tools have improved my writing and coding while saving countless hours of toil. However, ChatGPT is a new beast that glimmered in my eyes as a shadow of itself in my early twenties.

My first tech job resulted from a conversation with an Internet in a Mall employee in a private bot chat line on the EfNet #california IRC channel. I enjoyed configuring, manipulating, and feeding bots with inputs to get them to say funny things. I invited the employee to my private line, and after a few chats, I zipped down to the Topanga Mall and was hired on the spot to start selling Internet to Mallrats.

Internet in a Mall was a wild ride filled with crazy people who never saw a computer. After completing a sale with me, they used rudimentary GUIs and Netscape Navigator to surf the Internet. It was only a short time before I was tired of sales and became a tech support rep solving telephone and software problems. I’ve always loved helping people with technology.

After a few months, I became the tech support manager and hired several techs to field hundreds of support calls. TheMall, as we started calling IIAM, was expanding across the country with locations from the east to the west coast.

I found joy in training my team by giving them puzzles to solve, like a missing Windows 95 start button or the Mac vs. Windows challenge:

How do you take the floppy drive out?


So yeah, I’ve been around the block, but ChatGPT is a revolutionary step towards a different world entirely.

As developers glue together AI APIs with existing tools, we’ll see automation, unlike anything we’ve seen before. Our ability to produce digital content will commoditize the work of writers, coders, and other knowledge workers.

Watching people fall from trees, find new ways to climb them, and pick the fruits of new labor will be a wellspring of amusement.

AI is Humanity

I predict a resurfacing of human interest in a world transformed by AI. Instead of toiling on the same boring problems, we’ll find opportunities to grow and learn as a species. Instead of being a cog in the machine, we’ll focus on what matters most. We’ll focus on what makes us human. Actual human creation will become a prized possession rather than another noisy bit in the sea of Internet data.

AI is Now

I’ve always embraced change. It’s the only constant, the only thing I can depend on in our rapidly changing world. I’m excited to see how people use AI to simplify and address complex challenges like climate change, population management, resource allocation, and everything in between.

It’s a good thing I’m not a middleman. I’m glad I’ve shifted my focus to leadership rather than slinging code. I’ve found AI’s ability to sling code for me uncanny and eminently practical. Rather than focus on code problems, I’m focused on solving human problems, where I prefer to channel my energies.

Adaptation to change is a human superpower when we realize we wield it. When we let go of the past and embrace a new world with a beginner’s mind, we’ll find ourselves ready to plunge into the unknown again.