Someone always hates the new rock

Somewhere in the Stone Age, I’m reasonably certain the following conversation took place.

“Grog, what are you doing?”

“I’ve chipped this rock until it has a sharp edge.”

“Why?”

“Cuts things better.”

“What’s wrong with the old rock?”

“Nothing, really. This one is better.”

“Well, I don’t like it. Somebody will lose an eye.”

And thus began several thousand years of technological debate.

Human beings have always had ideas. Some were brilliant, some were disastrous and quite a few probably seemed brilliant until somebody lost an eye.

But we kept having them.

We sharpened stones, controlled fire, cultivated crops, built ships, printed books, harnessed steam, discovered electricity, invented telephones, motor cars, aeroplanes, antibiotics, television, computers and machines that make coffee while we stand nearby impatiently wondering why they are taking so long.

At almost every stage, there have been people saying, quite reasonably on occasions, “hang on a minute”.

The Luddites are usually dragged into these discussions as the historical champions of people who don’t like new things. That’s not entirely fair to them. They were skilled textile workers in early 19th-century England who saw new machinery threatening their livelihoods and wages. They weren’t necessarily opposed to invention; they were opposed to what some people were doing with it.

Nevertheless, they did smash quite a few machines.

It was an early demonstration of an important principle: technological change can make society better while making life considerably worse for particular people along the way.

Progress rarely arrives carrying flowers.

Sometimes progress occurs because the last great advance turns out to be poisoning us.

Take colour. The Victorians became particularly fond of vivid greens. Unfortunately, some fashionable green pigments contained arsenic. It appeared in wallpaper, clothing, artificial flowers and even book covers. Looking fashionable could apparently involve choosing between being beautifully dressed and remaining alive.

Eventually we found better ways of doing things.

That is another feature of human progress that we sometimes overlook. We don’t merely invent. We correct stuff. 

Something works. We discover what is wrong with it. Somebody improves it.

Rinse and repeat for several thousand years.

Even words have suffered from technological assistance.

Once, if you were writing something and couldn’t remember what a word meant, you reached for a dictionary. Nobody considered this cheating. Nobody said, “You should have known that yourself.”

Then somebody invented the thesaurus.

This was considerably more dangerous.

Suddenly a perfectly ordinary sentence could become magnificent, splendid, exceptional, exemplary, illustrious and occasionally incomprehensible.

I confess to using both.

Indeed, writers have always surrounded themselves with devices for improving what comes out of their heads: dictionaries, encyclopaedias, style guides, notebooks, libraries, editors, proofreaders and that friend who says, “I don’t understand what you mean here.”

None of these things actually writes the thought for you. They help you get at it.

Which brings me to 1969.

I was a young bloke who announced that I was going into advertising.

My parents were completely bewildered.

Advertising?

Was that actually a job?

They understood jobs. Proper jobs had recognisable titles, identifiable tools and, preferably, some prospect of remaining exactly the same until retirement.

Advertising sounded suspiciously like drawing pictures and making things up.

As it turned out, I made a career of it.

Then, in 1984, I bought a computer.

This was another questionable decision.

Computers were enormous, mysterious things associated with scientists, banks and people who understood what RAM was. Ordinary people wrote with pens, pencils and typewriters.

Nevertheless, I bought one.

Then something quite unexpected happened.

I learned to type.

I learned to use spreadsheets.

Things that had once involved paper, rulers, calculators, erasers and considerable swearing could suddenly be changed, recalculated and rearranged.

The computer didn’t make me cleverer.

It made certain things easier.

I still had to decide what I wanted to do.

And now we have artificial intelligence.

Once again, the Stone Age conversation has resumed.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m asking the computer a question.”

“Why?”

“It can help me find things, organise ideas, check something, explain something or suggest another way of looking at it.”

“Well, I don’t like it.”

And some of that discomfort is justified.

AI makes mistakes. It can produce rubbish with magnificent confidence. There are serious questions about employment, copyright, privacy, education, misinformation and who ultimately benefits from the technology.

Those questions should be asked.

They should be asked loudly.

But asking difficult questions about a technology is quite different from pretending the technology isn’t here.

It is here.

And it has quite a way to go.

The sensible choice, I think, is neither to kneel before it nor smash the machinery.

Learn what it does.

Learn what it does badly.

Work out where it can help.

Keep humans responsible for the decisions that matter.

We have done this before.

Not every great change has involved a machine. There was a time when giving women the vote was regarded by perfectly respectable people as dangerous, radical and potentially disastrous. Today the astonishing thing is not that women vote. It is that anyone ever seriously argued they shouldn’t.

Human progress is full of ideas that once looked threatening because they disturbed the existing order.

Of course, change is not the same thing as improvement. History is littered with wonderfully innovative bad ideas.

But the desire to change things, to find a better way, to ask could we do this differently? seems to be one of the most natural human characteristics we have.

The ride is bumpy.

Some things will go wrong.

Some things should probably never have been invented.

Some people will be hurt by changes that benefit others, and that deserves much more consideration than the usual glib promises about progress.

But refusing to look at reality isn’t helpful.

AI isn’t evil.

It isn’t magic, either.

It is another tool produced by that strange human habit that started when someone picked up an ordinary rock and wondered whether it might work better with a sharp edge.

I once had a friend who started a pure-water business using reverse osmosis. Knowing I was in advertising, he asked me to come up with a name. Naturally, I reached for that dangerous piece of technology, the thesaurus. Under water, one of the first expressions I found was Adam’s Ale. Perfect. I pitched it. Unfortunately, somebody else had already thought so and registered it.

So we kept looking and eventually settled on Aqua Pura.

Nobody accused me of cheating because I’d used a thesaurus. The thesaurus hadn’t named the business. It had helped me think. I still had to recognise a good idea, discover it wouldn’t work, and find another one.

Which, when you think about it, is not a bad description of how to use it today.