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I don't want to talk about AI anymore.

I grew up as part of the last “go play outside” generation before digitized social lives even existed. I often practiced backyard sports by myself at home. I'd work through basketball drills in the driveway and throw baseballs and lacrosse balls at a taped strike-zone on the wooden retaining wall off to the side. I skateboarded in the street, biked to friends' houses across town, and called land-lines to ask if they could sleep over. In fact, the first time I called to ask someone out, it was her house phone and I didn't have to use an area code because we lived in the same town. Her brother was the one who answered, and then her dad took the phone from him and said "who is this??" while I tried to say my name without squeaking.

My first cell phone was a Motorola Razr, and I got it while we still had a land-line  with a rotary-dial plugged into the wall at home. And yet, my generation were also the early adopters of every new piece of technology that our current slice of chaos is built upon. We were the original super-users of digital media platforms—the pilot group for Myspace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, and even Snapchat. We had “family computers” that always seemed to live in the kitchen for some reason, but we really didn’t need to use them for anything until middle school when we learned about the revolutionary technology known as ClipArt.

For all the antiquated stuff that school shoved down our throats, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel became the most relevant. I still use two of them daily.  The first asynchronous, social-messaging tool I used was AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). It was the first time you could set a status in the form of an away message. Now, you can get chastised at work for not updating that on Slack.

That was also the first time we started using AI by talking to chatbots (SmarterChild anyone??), and that was circa ~2005.

Coincidentally, that was around the time when I first dipped my feet into the world of web development... I learned how to change the wallpaper of my Myspace page with custom, embedded html code so Chamillionaire’s 2005 song "Ridin'" would play on repeat, too.

Which, um... yeah.

Yikes.

Remember those Tamagotchi things? The little keychains with the thing you had to "keep alive" like some Home-Ec class project? Well, that's what this non-stop AI conversation is starting to feel like: Tamagotchis all over again. We're being pulled away from living our lives to take care of a digital responsibility we didn't really even sign up for. Not willingly, anyway. It was thrust upon us.

What's really crazy to me, is that the same people who told our generation not to trust everything we saw on TV when we were growing up, seem to the folks who will now readily accept hallucinations from ChatGPT or Claude as gospel.

Weird.

In 2024, I wrote about how AI will wreck the economy. It, um... well... I’ve never really been one to say “I told you so", so this is me not saying it.

But also, I just really don't want to talk about AI anymore.

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Our Daily MAP Year Prompt
295/365

What nostalgic piece of tech are you glad to be rid of? Which would you bring back?

onward.

For more on this daily column and The MAP Year Project, read the backstory here. And if you know someone who'd appreciate this, pass it along.