“I understand your frustration”: AI and the risk of not embracing such a major change

This blog has many young readers who weren't even born when I started designing websites over 20 years ago.

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Today, it's common to talk about "digital natives" to refer to people who have grown up with computers and the internet from a very young age. I'm 49 years old, and in my case, you could say I'm a digital settler: I belong to a generation that, at most, started learning the basics of MS-DOS in school. When Windows 95 came out, I was already 19. Unlike today's children, who grow up mastering these tools with the same ease that my generation mastered crayons, many of us have had to adapt to a world that was changing forever.

In my case, this learning, once I finished school, was entirely self-taught. It was a fascinating change, one that left an old friend of mine sad and alone: ​​the Larousse encyclopedia. For years I had worn its covers to shreds with constant consultations, almost always on historical topics. It's been decades since I last picked up one of its volumes. Nowadays, searching for anything is very easy thanks to the Internet, and the result isn't limited to text and printed images, but includes multimedia content. It's something many of us wouldn't have imagined when we were children.

The Internet generated a process similar to that of other technological advances, a process that generated a lot of fear. Many feared losing their jobs (and indeed many did) because they became obsolete. The same thing had already happened with the invention of the printing press and the typewriter, which relegated the scribe profession to a beautiful hobby for romantics and calligraphy geniuses like a dear Polish friend of mine. Later, the telegraph, the telephone, and finally the internet killed the postal service. I was a compulsive letter writer, and for years now I've only used the postal service to send one or two Christmas cards a year.

Something similar is now happening with artificial intelligence (AI). Its emergence is revolutionizing many things and casting dark clouds over the future of many professions. Like all changes, artificial intelligence will bring both good and bad things, and it will be up to us to separate the wheat from the chaff, but what is undeniable is that nothing will ever be the same again, just as happened with the printing press, the telephone, or the internet.

Of course, the emergence of this new invention doesn't mean that things from the past and present will disappear. I don't want artificial intelligence to write for me, because I enjoy writing. I do it with the same devotion with which I used to pour the ink from my Parker pen onto a blank sheet of paper, then put it in an envelope, stamp it, and drop it in a mailbox. Artificial intelligence can be a threat or a help, and it's up to us to make it the latter. It's a tool that can be very useful if we use it wisely and avoid excesses.

I admit I'm not very familiar with artificial intelligence (I still have the habits of a digital settler), but I'm slowly getting used to it. This week I was searching on Google for information to make some changes to the blog's web design, specifically regarding a very particular issue for which I couldn't find a solution. It occurred to me to write a query to Grok, the artificial intelligence of X (I still call it Twitter), and after a few seconds, my digital interlocutor began its response with these words: "I understand your frustration". It then offered me several solutions, very well organized and explained, which I hadn't been able to find after many Google searches.

Little by little, I'm realizing that artificial intelligence is full of opportunities and that it will be a great help to my work, as it allows me to save time on computer-related inquiries. It even offers me very good design advice! Of course, this doesn't mean we should put our brains on hold and let AI think for us: even searching the Larousse encyclopedia required a certain level of judgment, just as a digital artist must still have artistic understanding, like someone who draws with a pencil.

The risk of not embracing such change is that the world won't stop because we refuse to accept it, because we don't want to lose penmanship, telegraphs, print media, or vinyl records. Similarly, the fact that some politicians believe everything can be regulated, even the words we use and how we use digital tools, only serves to turn us into a society forced to solve the same problems as everyone else, but with one hand tied behind our back. That is precisely what is happening today in the European Union and one of the main causes of the backwardness we are falling into, largely due to the influence of some who call themselves—paradoxically—"progressives."

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Image: Grok.