Artificial Intelligence | Daniel Chapell’s The Age of Old People

Today, we can divide the world into two: those who have realized the profound social changes that began with the launch of GPT Chat in November 2022, and those who have not yet realized it.

A few days ago, I was chatting with a good friend who wondered why the boom in artificial intelligence (AI) and the changes that are happening in other latitudes were not felt in Peru, and I began to reflect on the technological changes in recent decades and what has happened to each of them.

I was thinking about some of the big “events” and how these changes create a gap between those who understand the latest technologies and those who are not familiar with them. The latter just need to observe the scenes and changes without being direct participants themselves. He reviewed the examples from the emergence of the Internet and web pages, “smartphones” and their applications, to the more recent wave of data science, “business intelligence” and “machine learning”, all of which have something in common: young people ride these technology waves, and the rest are left behind by these new concepts, tools and developments.

For all those who are left behind, the “digital transformation” was and still is (even as a professor). Change must be made with the acceptance of change, because others have already mastered the latest technologies, and the train of modernity has given priority seats to the “digital natives”, the technologists and, in general, to the generation that challenges the previous one with the new technologies when it arrives. The new modernity.

At the time I wondered if this phenomenon of artificial intelligence or generative AI would be a new technological revolution of its kind. Would it be a new wave of applications that improve productivity? Would it be a new search engine that now hilariously knows how to talk through avatars? Would it be a tool that could make songs, write on command, and put certain professions out of work in the process? No, it wasn’t that.

Eric Schmidt and Henry Kissinger, in their latest collaboration for a famous book to be published in 2023, as well as Mustafa Suleiman (CEO of Microsoft AI), Jensen Huang (CEO of NVIDIA) and many other thinkers, have stressed that the transformation of society generated by the massive presence of AI will take us to a leap similar to the (reverse) invention of the printing press, which they even claim is the greatest leap since the invention of fire, and we are facing a huge leap. The new “digital species” envisions a future where each of us will have our own digital assistant, or we can all become programmers, thus ending the era where we all want our children to learn computing.

It was this statement by NVIDIA’s CEO that “we will all become programmers” that gave me the most insight into the widespread apathy in the face of such fundamental change: it happens that we don’t understand or believe that we are all part of this revolution.

This is a revolution of users, the turn of those who have experience and have ever thought about improving processes. It seems that this is the era when people see shortcomings and needs and only think about how to find a tool that can help them complete the task.

It’s like a primitive man who needed to cook for his children and appreciated the invention of controlling fire more than the entire tribe, like the Egyptian priest’s assistant who knew that the ten thousand symbols contained in his writing knew how the creation of a 26-character alphabet was the greatest invention that would finally allow him to express his ideas freely (and the ideas of many others), thus beginning the great democratization of knowledge.

We have to believe this because AI has arrived to make real change possible in the service of society. Today is the era of solution-makers, not solvers. In a world where we can be our own programmers, developers will no longer dominate. In the future, for the first time, all of us will play the game of digital tools, where experience is the differentiating variable and no generations will be left behind.

To achieve this change in Peru using artificial intelligence, we are looking for developers with experience in all areas of knowledge to change everything, adapt to all of us, learn everything. And in this regard, the elders still have a lot to teach.