AI – Artificial Intelligence or Alien Invasion?
At the age of 58 I’ve witnessed the technological revolution pretty much from the start to now. When I left secretarial college in 1985 I could, amongst other things:
• Write shorthand at 140 wpm
• Type at 70 wpm
• Work out payroll with a calculator
• Re-ink and fix a duplicator with a spanner
The mantra being – a good personal secretary never gets flustered.
In my first job I used the shorthand and typing and my A level English to put the letters right that were dictated to me plus my typing skills. The only thing I really rely on now is my good English and the typing.
In 1986 we had the Post Office strike and in came fax machines. At the time they were an investment, however, the expensive shiny paper they printed on faded in files so, if the file needed to come out of archive at some point in the future, it was discovered that the faxed pages had gone blank. Seeing the panic on someone's face as they flick through a file full of blank pages, firstly in disbelief then again in sheer terror before finally hoping that if they look again it will be there before waving it at you exclaiming "oh my god, what are we going to do!?"
My second job was in a firm of Solicitors where we had a state of the art IBM system. We all had monitors with the eye-damaging green typeface and a server in a huge room. I’ve always been a bit of a techy and one day, when all the other monitors were free in the office I worked in, I set the computer downloading the time recording on all the files my boss wanted to bill simultaneously. It froze the whole system for the rest of the day and nothing else got done. Very embarrassing at the time.
Then in 1994 I was at home with my baby son and I decided to start my own business ‘Alpha-Byte Secretarial Services’ I bought one of the first home computers and a printer, dial-up internet and away I went, advertising in the Yellow Pages and doing CVs for people, theses for students (I only agreed to do a chemistry one once and, if you know you know) and posters and mailshots. The first real word processing programme was ‘WordPerfect’ and it took a bit of navigating, all adding to my knowledge.
The next noticeable stage was when the children were starting school and getting little bits of homework. Whereas you would have had to look things up when I was at school, we had some fun family times gathered around the computer letting the children Ask Jeeves what the name for a baby eagle was or a baby owl. It was all very novel at the time and things we all did together which was nice and that was really the time I think that the ‘world wide web’ really started to snowball into what it is today.
I then returned properly to work in 2004, again working for a firm of Solicitors, when things really had moved on. We all had our own computers and the office management system was a different thing altogether, much more user friendly and helped of course by the Microsoft Office Suite which bears no resemblance to WordPerfect. I’ve seen office technology change and develop over the last 20 years and we now have a system that does everything and can be completely paperless. Whereas in 1993 there would be a post room full of post and a post room assistant who was also a courier going around all the firms of solicitors in Leeds collecting and dropping off hand deliveries with sacks full of post and DX, the post area in our large office in Wakefield has a single tray for post and a tray for DX. How times have changed. In City Square in Leeds after 5.00 p.m. in 1985 there would lots of Royal Mail carts transporting mail from the main post office to the depot on Aire Street and then whizzing round to the Railway Station for the mail trains. It was a sight to see and must have looked like an ant run from above. The Post office is now a restaurant, the depot is an apartment block and nobody hand delivers now unless it’s an urgent deadline that requires an original.
The cute little search engines such as ‘Ask Jeeves’ are no more and Google has taken over completely. Anything you want to know you can find out instantly. Is that a good thing? It’s my opinion that being able to do that means we are not retaining the information we are so interested in at that moment and it’s gone as quickly as it appears in our brain. Could this be a reason there are so many people being diagnosed with ADHD or wondering if they have it, especially older people like me? I do believe that it’s addictive to want to know something instantly. Are the algorithms and big data on all this technology set up to turn us into “scatterbrains”?
One thing I have got out of Google is the maps which have really changed my life and I now have the confidence to set off somewhere new. Google even tells you which lane you want and, when you’re looking at 75 of them on the M6 and need to make a decision, that is an absolute life saver because I would normally panic at that point and pick a random one. I had to cross London recently and Google gave me the Underground route so I didn’t have study the map. Is that such a good thing? Would it be better for our brains to study the map and work it out? I didn’t need to work out what ticket to buy because you just scan your credit card.
Amazon came on the scene initially selling just books. Now you can buy literally anything and sometimes it’s there in half an hour. Is that killing our high streets?
Streaming films and tv shows means you can binge watch something in one night and there’s that instant availability again. Can you remember what you streamed last night and kept watching? Sometimes I struggle to.
Then of course there’s social media. Love it or hate it, it’s a huge part of many people’s lives. Facebook had been around for some time before I took the plunge and got the app on my smart phone. I have family and friends in Canada, America and Australia and it was a lovely way to see photographs, send messages, video call and have a connection that long distance phone calls in the 80s couldn’t provide. Was that the start of people not interacting anymore? Was that the start of the decline in the pub trade because it’s easier to sit at home with a drink and instantly message someone rather than arranging a social connection?
Finally, we have AI. In my opinion this is taking over at a frightening pace. I’ve tested it out and it takes a second to respond to a question, can fake images and voices to the point we don’t know whether what we are seeing is real. I used it to design my logo and the intuitiveness of it is mind boggling. As I’m writing this article, Copilot is hovering in the margin waiting for me to ask it to re-write my work. It will not be happening. There is a psychology version of AI offering artificial therapists to people but the initial findings, I believe, say that this makes people with mental health issues feel worse and the thing they really need is human interaction.
Conclusion
Back in the day at the beginning of my working life, letters were dictated, typed, taken to be signed in a leather signing book full of blotting paper pages so that my boss could sign with his fountain pen and then posted. The responses to those letters took a couple of days and life moved along at that pace. Now, the majority of correspondence goes by email and sometimes you have a response in less than a minute. Does sending out emails on different matters and receiving responses constantly on all different matters contribute to the explosion of ADHD? Perhaps there are a lot of people who have gone through life with undiagnosed ADHD and this modern way of living has made their traits more difficult to manage?
All these advances in technology are embraced when they arrive but every one of them has grown a dark side. The internet has a dark web used by criminals. Social media is a stalker’s paradise as I found to my cost. Not only was my page under constant scrutiny but also the pages of the people on my friends list. People like this lurk around the dark side of social media and think they have a right to disregard your privacy and make hurtful comments. They have the delusional belief that’s their duty to impose in your life and then rip you to pieces. If they don’t like you then why look at your social media? As a consequence, my friends list is now private and I have that much security around my Facebook page that even the people I want to find me might struggle. However, there is never a 100% way of keeping people like that away. Then there are the ‘influencers’ constantly projecting their toxically perfect lives at us. I worry what that is doing to our children’s mental health when I see women putting photographs of their daughters on that have been enhanced. I also worry about the people who are projecting this false perfection when it’s not real. How do they deal with it when they can’t keep up the pretence? In my opinion, they start stalking people like me to hurt them publicly to make themselves feel better. When I qualified as a counsellor last year I launched my private practice and every marketing site I went to for tips was saying “it’s all about the socials”, you have to have a presence because that’s where everyone is now. I reflected on this for many months until I realised that my stalker was dictating how I was promoting my practice and, having worked so hard to get my qualification, I set up a professional page on Facebook and have had to deal with the knowledge that they will be looking at it and the way it makes my skin crawl. It’s been a mixed experience and not one that I’m comfortable with or intend to do long term.
Finally, I think AI potentially has the darkest side of all. All the working roles that I’ve talked about have gone or will shortly disappear. If you go into a supermarket now there are very few checkouts where you can pass the time of day as your shopping is scanned. Our pubs are disappearing even in villages where they were once the hub for locals to gather and socialise. Our high streets and markets are disappearing because it’s easier and cheaper to buy things online. Around the world at the moment driverless vehicles are being tested and introduced. That will take away local cab drivers who you can chat with on your journey. Instead, we’ll probably end up looking at our phones. How safe will women and vulnerable people be travelling on their own? What will our children and grandchildren have to be ambitious about or plan for or study for? I believe that technology is a massive contributor to the mental health struggles we are seeing now. Everything arrives instantly in your head at the touch of a button and it’s also gone instantly to the point our brains struggle to cope but can we disconnect from it? I’m not sure that we can and it’s too powerful to stop now. I did consider putting this on ChatGPT and asking its opinion but I’m not sure I’d like the answer.