“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …”
A Charles Dickens world if ever there were one.
I am both fascinated and irritated by the marvels that keep unraveling around me. Like many of you, I have a stockpile of experience doing without things we could not do without today.
That is the privilege of being a granny. The good old days.
But I am also a fairly aware and engaged senior citizen too, watching new inventions unwrap around me like wrappings on Christmas presents.. Technology taken places I never thought I’d see.
There is a lot of AI in the world these days. Artificial Intelligence. According to Wikipedia, AI is “Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making.
Computer programs designed to make things easier to do, to see, to imagine.
As you may already have guessed, I’m on the fence about this one. I am fascinated by what AI can accomplish. Lately I’ve been seeing clips of movie stars and their younger selves, movie stars and their older selves, landscapes only dreamed about; and computer generated galaxies and star clusters. I love that dinosaurs come to life on the big screen and that you can watch water in a swirl in slow motion up into the air. I love the preciseness drawing and creating with AI gives us average humans, enabling us to tweak nature like never before.
What bothers this older BoHo lady, though, is how AI is taking over jobs and tasks meant to be developed in the human brain.
These days AI can write letters, resumes, stories and research papers. AI automatically corrects your text and suggests different words in cases of awkwardness. It can create paintings that look so real you need to touch the canvas to see if there’s really paint there.
How will today’s kids learn to spell and put sentences together and do research if they don’t do it on their own?
The Internet has unlimited directions on information, real and made up. You can ask whatever you want and their is an answer out there somewhere. No going through books or figuring out logic with pencil and paper. Ask and you will receive.
I struggled — and succeeded — to be a prolific writer. I was a proofreader and blogger for my last company, and corrected the most confusing grammar from those making ten times more than I did. Yet these days writers of copy and information and proposals let an intelligent computer do the work for them.
I guess this walks the same line as schools not teaching cursive anymore. I can’t imagine not being able to write my name or a sentence or note to a friend without it. These days as long as you can sign your name you don’t need the rest.
I know I know — it’s the inability of the old to give in to the new. I am not an old fogie — I’m more of an older BoHo Gal. I am absolutely for advancement of the species. I have seen and learned things past generations could only dream of.
But I still want to hold on to the old way of doing things for a little while longer.
What do you younger stallions think?
As some of you may know, I lost my youngest son four years ago. Last Saturday I finally got a tattoo honoring him and my love for him.
Well, I’ve certainly not been bored lately. 
I was sitting out on my back deck this morning and noticed this little guy hanging on from the top branch of the tree.
At 6 AM everyday, I see an old man sitting alone in the park, sipping hot coffee from his Peet’s mug. He keeps his mask under his chin, and watches the birds flying above. I try to keep the social distance, tip-toe, and balance my steps with my foggy glasses and cotton masks. Yet I wonder why he is there, for months, at that time of the day, alone.
Humoring the Goddess 