June 28th, 2026
AI is here and it’s not going anywhere. The new technology is subject of much scrutiny and controversy. People are upset about AI forcing humans out of jobs. People are up in arms about huge data centers and their massive consumption of electricity and water. There is the question of what we should do with AI. Soon, the question will be, “What do we do without it?”
Innovations have always caused disruption in society. New skills have to be learned and old ones discarded. In my life there have been rapid and unexpected changes. Nowadays, who needs to know how to do long division or how to balance a check book or how to drive a car with a manual transmission? When I was young, it was important to be proficient with those tasks. Now, who cares?
I have a Toyota Corolla with a six-speed transmission. Yes, I know it’s archaic. At this point in time, a stick shift is more of an antitheft device than anything else. When I think about it, learning to use a stick was much more than just learning how to drive a car. Driving a stick required a person to coordinate all of their limbs in one fluid motion. Using a stick shift also forced a person to pay attention to several types of sensory input simultaneously: the sound of the engine rpms, the view of the traffic surrounding the vehicle, the feel of the transmission, and maybe the smell of burning clutch. Learning to drive stick taught a person to do more than just operate a vehicle. I wish I had learned to drive stick shift before I went to flight school. The experience might have helped me to learn how to fly a helicopter more easily.
The flow of technology generally goes in only one direction. Things continually become more efficient, more interconnected, and more fragile. There are examples in history of technological expertise being lost. Those episodes are uniformly ugly. Going back to the old ways is almost always difficult, and often impossible. Let me give you an example from my work life.
Back in 1988, I started a job as a dock supervisor at a trucking company. We had computers then, but they were clumsy cumbersome machines. There was no internet worth mentioning. The devices were mainly used to crunch numbers for reports and stats. The day-to-day operation on the loading dock and with the city drivers was done with mountains of paper and landline telephones.
For instance, the dispatcher had to keep track of shipments to be picked up and the whereabouts of his drivers by telephone. The office personnel took calls from customers for pickups and wrote down the information on cards that the dispatcher posted on a board. The dispatcher had to wait for a driver to call him before he could assign him some pickups. The drivers had beepers, which really only told the driver to find a landline and call the dispatcher ASAP. The whole process was tedious and inefficient, but the work got done. I had a similar operation on the dock. I was responsible for getting hundreds of shipments loaded and delivered to scores of customers each day. I handled an absurdly large amount of paperwork, and somehow it all got done.
Fast forward to the year I retired. In 2015 we had plenty of new technology and everybody had a handheld computer. The dockworkers and the drivers scanned the codes on the shipments to load them on to trailers. The amount of paper involved was minimal. The activity on the dock and in the city could be monitored in real time. Customers sent their pickup requests to us online. The phones did not ring very often. Everything was done on a screen. It was impressive.
Then the apocalypse hit. One day all the computers companywide went down. The phone rang constantly because the customers had to call in their pickup orders. Dispatch was flooded with notes on scraps of paper. Trailers that came to us from faraway cities were like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates. Every shipment inside them was a surprise to us. We did not know what freight was coming to us, and we did not know how to deliver it to our local customers. We were lost.
A few of us had been working this shift for years (or decades) and based on our collective experience, we knew where to load a shipment without a computer or even without any paperwork. So, we routed every inbound shipment by just looking at the name and address of the delivery customer. We told the forklift drivers what to put into which trailer. We had them make up delivery paperwork by copying packing lists. We gave the ersatz delivery receipts to the drivers for the customers to sign. Because of our institutional memory, we got almost all of the shipments delivered that day. We remembered how we had done the work before the computers had taken over. That made all the difference.
That was ten years ago. I doubt that there is that kind of collective memory at my old workplace now. I am almost certain that if there was a total computer failure there, everything would come to a screeching halt. That’s the problem when a new technology takes over. There is no turning back.
Ten years ago, we were saved by a copy machine and a stubby pencil.
What happens when AI is running the show?
Frank is Emptiness 