New Tech Should Go Straight to the Young

Whenever I speak badly about cryptocurrencies - saying, for example, that governments will never allow them to work as actual currencies - my peers hit me with a rather sore and entirely true point. I didn't make a single penny from the crypto boom in 2017, despite being a data scientist who was very much on the "inside" relative to the general market. Worse, I didn't post any short positions in early 2018 either, even though I thought a crash was inevitable, at some point.

I mention this because it's a visceral example (for my bank balance!) of a peculiar property of the tech ecosystem - lots of things can be true at the same time. Crypto can be a terrible currency and an extremely profitable investment. Governments can be interested in digital currencies and fundamentally opposed to crypto. I can be a very good data analyst and unable to time market crashes. (Though, in fairness, every data analyst is unable to time market crashes - our incompetence is one reason they happen).

Such coexisting truths filter to every level. Windows, for instance, is an awful operating system and the only functional option for most people. And, on a serious note, technology can increase your quality of life and decrease your job security. It can open new opportunities for you and close off those you were already comfortably taking advantage of.

Normally, however, there is at least a balance between the scale of technological changes and their speed. People and systems can normally adapt quite well, even if they're not entirely cognisant of what's happening. Marketers and publicists have proven themselves adept at this, moving their clients through the era of personal social media accounts, then the age of leveraging influencers, and into the current podcast appearance boom. An odd modernism is that it would take forever to list all the brands and celebrities who didn't lose out to these changes.

It's also oddly modern that your office is probably about the same as it was twenty years ago. Just like construction sites are about the same as they were. The major twentieth-century changes to both were computers and power tools, but in the last twenty years, what? Those power tools are fancier and cordless, now, but still do the same things, and office computers come with flat-screen monitors and you can carry a laptop around with you. Which is nice, but it doesn't amount to a technological revolution. Generative AI might.

Hands up, I have no concrete idea how generative AI is going to play out. Nobody does. For that matter, nobody has worked out what generative AI is even for, not really - to paraphrase Benedict Evans: we know it's a big deal, we just don't know who’s deal it is. But we do know that companies are investing so much money into AI that we'll need to build data centres on Neptune to keep up with compute demand, and that some companies are planning to lay off staff and replace them with "AI efficiencies", and that other companies are being founded as "AI startups" that will - if AI is valuable - create new jobs, possibly better ones.

But we really don't know how we'll cope with the scale and speed of the techno-economic change generative AI will (might!) bring. Through previous changes, the "established generation" took on the bulk of the burden - the forty, fifty and sixty year-olds in management positions had to decide how their organisations would adapt and thrive and ensure that younger people developed the right skill mixes.

When my grandparents were the established generation, they'd already lived through the mass mechanisation of everything and gained plenty of experience of rapid change. And by the time my parents took on the mantle, they had been hardened to change through computerisation and the explosive growth of the web. Younger readers, I'm sorry, you guys have me - I've seen my desktop become a laptop, and I've got a cordless power drill in my garage. Good luck.

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