It's Only Star Trek
You'll know how to deal with tomorrow's computers, probably.
As people stop losing their minds over what they believe AIs will do in, for and to America and the world, things will start to become familiar. That is especially the case for folks who are literate with science fiction. Like everything else worth doing, innovation, adventure policy change, ideas and concepts need to be socialized. The future is already here, it’s only unevenly distributed. Know the sci-fi and you’ll recognize the similarities. Fictional history rhymes in the minds of those shaping the future. You may be hearing HAL, or you may be hearing WOPR, or you may be hearing COLOSSUS. All of those fictional computer systems have existed before in our imaginations. They were hype and speculation before and they are hype and speculation now. In time they will be commonplace - like an episode of Friends even though nobody lives in a NY apartment that huge.
One of the most iconic scenes in the Star Trek universe was from the film The Voyage Home in which Scotty, the chief engineer is on mission to violate the timeline in ancient (our modern-day) San Francisco. In order to build a whale sized aquarium out of transparent aluminum, which hasn’t yet been invented, he bangs out the formula on an old Mac that doesn’t even have voice recognition. “How quaint”.
Of course this was hilarious to those who understood that the characters in Star Trek had always talked to their computers. Plus, everyone I knew when I worked in Silicon Valley wished one day that they might have a ‘Tricorder’ which is basically three times what an iPhone is today, when at the time it was twelve times. We still can’t scan underground geology or detect ‘life signs’ of an injured person. But we can record and speak to it and it can connect with massive computers at a distance.
Having a conversation with a computer is commonplace today, and while cellphone addiction and doomscrolling are just epiphenomena of Peasants engaged with Genius products, it’s still just a side-channel for advertising in the majority of cases. In other words, the iPhone isn’t making your teenager stupid, the way they use the tool reveals their innate stupidity. It’s the tool, fool. I have, for example, a first rate Pickett & Eckel Business Financial Slide Rule. I’m incompetent at using this relic, but I still use my old HP 12C and quadrille. These things work with your brain differently and such disciplines are good for you, better than interpreting cursive, and better than talking to Alexa, who can’t solve household expense allocation problems.
Whose Browser?
As the investments and infestations of AI take place over the next decade, one of the first signals of the new ‘empowerment’ will be that you will cede control over your browser. Your favorite AI assistant will sprout ‘agents’ which will do tasks for you by browsing the internet for you. You might ask Siri to shop auto insurance companies. You had better be specific and name companies, because you shouldn’t actually trust these agents to prioritize your priorities. I do this kind of searching on the web all of the time, by myself.
This weekend, as the Spousal Unit and I did some financial spring cleaning, I needed to file claims hanging over from last year’s HSA which still had some cash in it. I cannot imagine that this will be left up to non-AI. As a convenience, who could resist an AI agent that you can authorize to query CVS and Walgreens, find out from your HSA provider how much cash you can spend, then automatically file claims for you? We discovered the pain of trying to figure out if we used the HSA card or our regular credit cards to pay for our Rx meds, and how to recognize when we used her insurance vs my insurance and which of the two HSA accounts went in an out of valid claim date ranges.
All of this is actually very pedestrian calculation in the world of data engineering, but it lives in a realm of computer science that I call ‘Salesforce’. I mean that in a derogatory way, rather like the use of the terms chicken wire, bandaids, bubblegum and spit describes some engineering. When you hear hype about how much coding AIs will be doing, you can be sure they are talking about the Salesforce realm, as contrasted to something like building kernel drivers for Linux.
So understand that this new era of agentic AI for the consumer market, one that could easily rival that of the actual huge company called Salesforce, is heir to a lot of mediocre computer science that has manifested itself historically in products like Lotus Notes, Oracle Forms and more recently Sharepoint. Know that without a doubt I have my biases against these ubiquitous trailing edge technologies. Do I still hate Wordpress? Yes I do. Do I still hate JavaScript? Yes in principle but there are edge cases for which I have loaded something called ‘npm’ on my machine. No matter how sophisticated you might consider yourself, never discount the capability of blunt force trauma. Big dumb sticks still matter in digital technology, not least because everybody understands them. These are the first tools that today’s lesser ape AIs will master. At which point you’ll be able to ask Siri if your prescription is ready at Walmart. Siri will ask permission to use your browser and login with your password. You will have taken the leap.
See if anyone reminds you of the simple when they sell you the hypothetical.
"Salesforce...because all businesses are kind of the same, and so is information management." That's a shallow person's dim view of the details of business. I've long been skeptical of anybody who would recommend Salesforce (except for salespeople, a class of people for whom I have great forgiveness).
And I claim this: I personally decreed and initiated the phase-out of Lotus Notes in a large enterprise. For years prior, we'd ask, "Why did we do it that way?" And the answer was, "Because we use Lotus Notes." Notes was like being locked into an engineering nether world. It took years to untether from that quirk-ridden beast.
And AI, because even machines can now mimic the depth of lazy human thinking. "I think it's true...I read it on the internet."
Loved the Star Trek episode. You're going to have a lot of material to work with over the coming five years, I suspect.