— It’s a tough wave to catch, but you better, because it’s gonna catch you.

No, this is not one of the 21 posts I have in draft, per my last Sunday’s missive. Rather, it’s just popping off something as I begin the next day at 04.00 in this crazy world of Artificial Intelligence that’s sort of involuntarily grabbing and pulling me in.

I can understand trepidation about it on several fronts.

• It’s moving too fast; you can say that again, but it’s going to move faster fast, if you know what I mean: the rate of change increases, like catching a wave.
• It’s too hard; almost, but in that regard it’s like a lot of new technologies in that way. I still remember laying my hands on Lotus 1-2-3 in 1988 and, undaunted, eventually created a massive tool for managing the $180 million fuel budget for all ships in the 7th Fleet (100s of them, all different burn rates), according to transit schedules. Now everybody can use spreadsheets.
• It’s for geeks; true, but not for very long…unlike cryptocurrency, and there’s good reasons for that. It’s because crypto has never lived up to its promise of being a useful currency, so mainstream isn’t going to bother with it, and we’re 15 years in, already. The usefulness of AI is so obvious that, as Solzhenitsyn said, “to taste the ocean requires but one drop.”

It’s on that last point that I’m all about, and I’m straddling the fence.

What fence?

It’s the fence between the geeks who can do this shit in their sleep and all the rest of us who just want to get shit done: better, more, faster, easier, and cheaper.

I mean, I could be wrong, but I’m banking and staking my claim on the notion that everybody will use AI tools if they’re accessible, effective, low-cost, and truly unleash a person’s creative potentials by removing so damn many barriers.

Why have computers come so far since the late 1980s, to where even poor people tending to rice fields have one in their pocket for about 100-bucks entry level, computer-phones that are 100-thousand-times more capable than the first few iPhone iterations that were all north of one thousand bucks?

The phones are so capable that unless the person works in an office, they’ve never touched a laptop, much less a desktop, yet they can blaze through a thousand different sorts of tasks on that computer-phone, and all while doing a video chat with mom…all on cheap, unlimited cell data… Many don’t even bother with Wi-Fi, anymore.

People will absolutely use the tech if it’s accessible and can improve their lives; which, rudimentarily, means getting more done towards a wealthier, more leisurely life…and at a lower effort and cost.

It’s elementary.

So, what am I to do about that?