Automation Anxiety? An open book blog hop post

 

 

Welcome to Open Book Blog Hop. You can find us every Monday talking about the writing life. I hope you'll check out all the posts: you'll find the links at the bottom of this post.

Do you suffer from Automation anxiety? (the fear that advancements in technology, particularly artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, will lead to widespread job losses, rendering people's skills obsolete and potentially leaving them unemployed, causing significant worry and stress about the future of work.)

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 I've lived my entire life in a time of rapid changes in technology. 

For example, in my short 50ish years on planet earth, there's been shift after shift in how I listen to music. When I was a child, we listened to the radio in the car and the radio or Mom's 45 records in the house. When I was a little older we got an 8-track player and thought we were so fancy. I was one spoiled kid when I got a transistor radio I could dangle off my bicycle handle bars to have music while I cruised the neighborhood. 

By the time I was a teenager, we'd moved to cassette tapes and I had a boom box of my own as well as a walkman, portable music player with headphones. We got the fancy boom box with two tape decks so you could copy from one tape to another to make mix tapes and record music off the radio to listen to on demand. Eventually, I had a tapedeck in my car.

Later, we did the same thing but on CDs, learning to "rip" and "burn" music before it was easy to download it. A fancy car music system could handle both CDs and cassette tapes. 

Then I got an iPod when they were new. So, what's that now? Six or seven different technologies just to listen to music? And all of that before I was 25 years old. We hadn't even gotten to streaming services yet. 

It's natural to feel nervous about new technologies. They come with good and bad things intermixed, and someone will always try to use them to circumvent fair play and "get away" with something. It's also true that new technologies do result in changes to the job market. We're seeing that with AI already, but we're also quickly finding the limits of what the latest and greatest technologies can do. It's an industry in its infancy, and the ethics haven't been established…and about the time they are, something new will have come along. 

So, all that is a longwinded way to say, "No." 

 I don't expend a great deal of energy worrying about AI. I try to learn enough about it to steer clear of the worst uses and take advantage of any helpful uses. I don't really believe that AI -written books and stories are going to replace human creation. It's even less likely that they can be safely relied on in business settings, where accuracy of information and subtleties of tone are so important.

There have always been scammers, cheaters, and liars, and there always will be. It's not the technology's fault. I'll just keep on creating in the ways that work for me, and try to stay abreast of new technologies well enough to be able to communicate with younger folks.

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