Tinys World of Technology BS

Thoughts From a Clicker
By Tiny Ruisch

Oh No!  The world as we know it is coming to an end!  At least that is what many people have been telling me.  Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here.  People are going to lose their jobs.  Deep fakes will be found everywhere.  We will not have any privacy.  We’re all going to be manipulated by algorithms.  I just hope that all this bad stuff doesn’t happen before I finish writing this column.

How many people will lose their jobs?  My guess is zero.  As with past technological advances, many jobs were created to replace those that were no longer needed.  The automobile caused the lost of much “horse work” employment.  We didn’t need blacksmiths, hostlers, saddle makers and many more.  There are hundreds of examples of this.  How many companies still make typewriters?  Try going to a store and buying a record album.  The list goes on and on.

Are fake objects going to be everywhere?  Probably.  If there is something of value, there will be a counterfeit of it.  Sometimes the fakes are even better than the originals.

We’re all going to lose our privacy.  I remember when I was a young boy growing up in a small town.  If I did something naughty, my parents would usually know about it fairly soon.  That darn telephone just took away all of my privacy.  The biggest difference now is that private information can be retrieved much faster than when Hoover’s FBI kept files on us.

Are we going to be manipulated by algorithms?  Aren’t we already?  Google maps tells what routes to take.  My writing program fills in many of my words after I type two or three letters.  Almost all of the things we watch, read or search for are recorded so that we can be advertised to.  The richest person in the world has so much privacy that no one knows who it is.

There have been so many other “end of the world” scares.  Remember Y2K?  That didn’t happen either.  I can tell you now that it was me that saved the world.  I changed the clock on my network time so that all of my electronics never did change to the year 2000.  After two years, when the scare was over, I finally allowed my clocks to update.

The decade of the 1980’s was going to be the end of the world several times.  It seems like everyone from Pat Robertson to the Jehovah’s Witnesses had proof positive that the “rapture” would be here soon.  Is it a coincidence that is the same era that personal computers started to become popular?  I can’t remember what George Orwell thought about it.

Wikipedia has a big list of dates that the world was or is going to end.  I’m not going to worry about the end of the world for a while yet.  Nostradamus made a detailed list of future predictions.  His prophecies end abruptly in the year 3797.  That’s when I’m going to worry.

Thanks for reading.