Editor's note: This is the sixth installment of our weekly TECH TALK column exploring the impact of new technology on creativity.
The author is also a composer (trained at Juilliard), so we've created a piece for you to listen to while reading this column. The song is titled “The Wild Lady of Half Moon Bay” and is performed by a solo piano.
You may remember that last week's column came with a more fully tuned version of “The Wild Women of Half Moon Bay.” Our authors have included this version to demonstrate why the piano is a portable orchestra capable of representing all instruments, and why it is the beloved instrument of composers around the world. This is a great way to achieve melody, harmony, and rhythm at the same time, which is not possible with most other instruments.
As a technocrat, I am naturally drawn to new technologies and am often an early adopter. Economies of scale have democratized technology and are now rapidly reshaping the world. This pace of change is not just steady; It's accelerating. This rapid acceleration into the unknown is a source of discomfort for many and highlights the need for all of us to better understand the consequences of technological advances.
All innovators are agents of change, whether we like it or not, but we can never predict all the effects of the changes we are proposing. Once a new invention gets going, it takes on a life of its own. Many technologies begin with the sole purpose of serving professionals and professionals working in a narrow field, but end up having unexpected and far-reaching impacts.
As we moved from vacuum tubes to transistors to integrated circuits, it would have been difficult to imagine a chip containing billions of transistors. In the past 10 years, Apple iPhone went from 1 billion transistors on its A7 chip in 2013 to 19 billion transistors on its A17 chip in 2023. I was a physics major and he was in college in 1973, and we had vacuum tubes. I built an initial circuit using a single transistor, replacing a single vacuum tube.
This year, we will have mobile phones in our pockets with 20 billion transistors on a single chip, and extremely powerful supercomputers will run on batteries, compared to 1973. It was an unpredictable development.
The first satellite navigation system was designed in 1958, and today GPS is popular. Who could have imagined that one day it would be so difficult to get lost? The gap in both performance and cost between professional and consumer electronics has narrowed to barely perceptible proportions. That's what happens when there are economies of scale. If he makes a million of something, the cost per item goes down significantly.
This democratization has created a frightening system for many, and it is accelerating rather than slowing down, meaning the rate of change is increasing. If you were worried about technology 10 years ago, you'll be even more worried 10 years from now.
For example, researchers working with large-scale language models that support general-purpose AI are often surprised by what these systems can do. I read a couple of days ago that a new AI program will find out when researchers are testing it, even if they don't know how they could know it. I read an article that says it can be done. Read the article here: https://venturebeat.com/ai/anthropics-claude-3-knew-when-researchers-were-testing-it/
There is now a government agency called DARPA. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) received a “D” in 1972 when it was renamed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The agency's name briefly changed back to ARPA in 1993, but the “D” was reinstated in 1996. When I moved to Berkshire, I was his DARPA Silicon Valley representative on a five-year contract. I can tell you that DARPA/ARPA is actually in the business of inventing things that have unpredictable end uses. Here are some that you already know and are probably familiar with: the Internet, GPS, cyborg sentient robots, GUI (graphical user interface), and SIRI. There are many others. NASA was also invented by his ARPA.
Should the fear be that we are building systems that we do not fully understand? One of the unpredictable and frightening consequences of this fear is that we are incapable of responding to the speed of change. More and more people are voluntarily handing over their power to dictators. please do not. These people are falling prey to a huge “scammer”. They convince themselves that it may really be possible to turn back the clock, but in reality it is not.
The point is that humanity can and does manage change, and there is an army of highly trained, intelligent people tasked with doing so. Most of them are very interested in how to do this safely and constructively. This does not remove the responsibility for understanding, using and managing technology from all of us. Most of us have become our own IT managers. We spend more time managing technology than mowing the lawn.
Sure we have a lot of technology and things are accelerating, but so do we. We are learning faster, living longer, iterating faster and faster, and we have a not-so-secret new weapon to help us deal with technology and its management. My name is Ai. We need to use AI to enhance our capabilities, and more and more of us are already doing so.
At the moment, Google, Microsoft, and Open AI are the most visible leaders in the software part of the space. Still, Nvidia, Apple, and Taiwan Semiconductor are designing next-generation chips. A new semiconductor facility is expected to come online in the United States in the not too distant future. But the game is changing, and these three will no longer be the only games in town. The little secret about software is that if you want it to work better, you need to get better hardware. There was a time when all hardware engineers wrote their own software. We built the hardware and we all had to write code to test it. Back then, any electrical engineer could code. In the future, we will see a proliferation of hardware manufacturers.
While some people are so afraid of coming changes that they want to stop and go back, most people around the world are not willing to give up on improving life expectancy and quality of life. If we surrender our personal power and freedom to a dictator, it will be difficult to go back. Hey, it happened before and was called the Dark Ages. And it took centuries for the Renaissance to occur.
Don't be afraid of change. Be cautious and curious and learn how to ride and manage waves. Ignorance is no excuse. In the age of YouTube in your pocket, you have to work hard to be ignorant. If you want to enjoy boating outings, it makes sense to learn how to swim. It is much more difficult to drown if you know how to swim.
Be aware of the shortcomings of technology. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Learn how to build a deeper relationship with technology. Learn how to manage it in your life and increase your ability to utilize it.
Use it as a tool. To some degree, we all do this. No, it won't slow you down. Instead of making you nervous, it will make you stronger and more capable.