How technology has already changed the world in my lifetime

AI is changing the world very quickly right now, having just radically altered the entire software industry just in the last few months. It’s a time of dizzying technological change, and it’s easy to feel a lot of future shock right now.

So I thought I’d repost something I wrote back in 2023, when LLMs were just starting to have a big effect on the world. Reflecting on the changes in my lifetime, I realized that the internet, social media, smartphones, and other digital technologies had already altered the world of my childhood into something almost totally unrecognizable. AI is changing how we think, learn, and work, but the internet already wreaked deep, lasting, confusing changes on how we socialize with each other and how we present ourselves to the world. Humans are fundamentally social creatures, so to be honest I’m not sure which has been the more wrenching change (though of course AI is just getting started).

Anyway, here’s the original post.

In 1970, Alvin Toffler published Future Shock, a book claiming that modern people feel overwhelmed by the pace of technological change and the social changes that result. I’m starting to think that we ward off future shock by minimizing the scale and extent of the changes we experience in our life. I tend to barely notice the differences in my world from year to year, and when I do notice them they generally seem small enough to be fun and exciting rather than vast and overwhelming. Only when I look back on the long sweep of decades does it stun my just how much my world fails to resemble the one I grew up in.

Back in March, Tyler Cowen wrote a widely read (and very good) piece about the rapid progress in generative AI. I agree that AI will change the world, usually in ways we’ve barely thought of yet. And I love Tyler’s conclusion that we should embrace the change and ride the wave instead of fearing it and trying to hold it back. But I do disagree when Tyler says we haven’t already been living in a world of radical change:

For my entire life, and a bit more, there have been two essential features of the basic landscape:

1. American hegemony over much of the world, and relative physical safety for Americans.

2. An absence