By Jim Hunt for the News and Journal
I was looking through some old papers and I ran across a report card that I had
received from my junior year in high school. As I looked over the various subjects, I saw
that I had received an A in typing. My high school typing class was filled with girls, which
might explain why I had taken the class. We would have timed exercises where our
teacher would have a stopwatch and I can remember pounding away on the old black
typewriters and when the teacher called “STOP”, most of the girls had far more on the
page than me. Fortunately, your skill at typing was composed of speed and accuracy
and although I was a good bit slower, I rarely had any errors. I didn’t know it at the time,
but my typing class was one of the most valuable classes of my high school and college
years.
Few other classes prepared me for the future like my typing class. When computers
became popular, I adapted my skills to the computer keyboard and could quickly
navigate this new technology. While work colleagues would struggle and “hunt and
peck” their way through assignments, I was efficiently finishing my work. Who could
have imagined that our lives would be dominated by these “word processors”, as they
were called.
I think that artificial intelligence may be the new “tech skill” that young people will need
to advance in the future. I have been using it and I can see what all the buzz is about.
Things that used to take days, can be completed in seconds. You can ask it to give you
a list of thirty things to do on a trip to London and it spits them out, faster than you can
read them. You can ask it to write you a poem or a short story about any subject and it
quickly pens a work of literature. You can give it something that you have written and
ask it to correct grammar and punctuation and it completes the task without fail.
The experts have cautioned that this new technology needs significant ‘guardrails’ to
keep it out of the hands of those who may use it to do harm to society. I would agree
that the potential for nefarious characters to wreak havoc is entirely possible. Already,
the video and audio artificial intelligence can take a speech by a political figure and
manipulate it to be nearly undetectable as a fake. Seeing the President or other political
figure spouting false information or ill intent is not only possible but being done on social
media sites throughout the internet. Some will say that it is easy to spot the fakes, but
as artificial intelligence develops, it will learn from its mistakes and fine tune its
processes to eliminate the ability to distinguish reality from computer generation.
The positive uses for artificial intelligence are immense and things like medical research
can cut years off development of cures for many terrible diseases and illnesses.
Analysis of data can change the way businesses operate and allow things like the
Amazon deliveries to become almost immediate, with drones and autonomous vehicles
dispatched as soon as you click on the order button. Grocery stores can analyze their
purchases and predict with near certainty, what and how many items to order.
While we need to be extremely cautious, the cat is already out of the bag and millions of
people, throughout the world are experimenting and discovering new uses for artificial
intelligence. Young people will need to learn this new technology and figure out where
they fit in. Much like my typing class in 1967, the speed of technology waits for no one
and those who succeed need to explore and master in ways not even fully known.