Monday Musings #42: AI Tools are Game Changers. Don’t Ask Me to Explain How They Work.
I am spending more and more time each week delving into the world of AI-powered search tools, and I know I am not alone. How about you?
These tools — new ones are seemingly launching faster than I can test-drive the existing ones — are changing my world in the same profound way that other technology-driven advances have changed all of our lives.
Personal computers, the advent of the Internet, email, search engines, social media, mobile technology and the universe of apps, the cloud, 3D printing, wireless and Bluetooth, the Internet of Things, and now AI all have brought life-changing opportunities and advances, redefined economies and productivity, social behaviors, and, yes, created unforeseen threats to privacy and other norms.
The downsides of technology breakthroughs, now as in the past, are not slowing anything or anyone down. We live in a strange world caught between two realities: There is the old world, where people on network television or commercial radio risk steep fines, licensing losses and worse for uttering certain prohibited words. And there is the new world, where foreign actors can hijack Facebook or Twitter, or criminals can steal your money with one phishing email or text message, and no one has to take responsibility.
The boundaries in the old world seem quaint in a world where all adjectives seemingly have been replaced by F-bombs. Boundaries in the new world, well, come to think of it, there are no real boundaries. It’s a world defined by a general lack of regulation. Frankly, most technology breakthroughs are beyond the recognition of the aging elected officials who preside atop the pyramid of government and regulation.
Does anyone want President Trump, former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell or former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to decide what goes or doesn’t go in this fast-evolving world? I’d like some body of intelligent thinkers to oversee unregulated markets and operators, but not them.
Perplexity relieved me of having to wade through pages of links dominated by Google that clog my screen with irrelevant sponsored content choices. ChatGPT made that experience even better. Now I’m trying to figure out ways to use Claude, released by Anthropic, to make my work life more productive. I’ve used AI tools to identify redundancy in book scripts, and I’ve been using it to search databases for relevant historical content.
Yet I’m not sure I’m doing much beyond fumbling my way through a new house of mirrors. There are days when I feel like the cartoon character Mr. Magoo, the comically near-sighted elderly man who proceeds forward in life, clueless to all that is befalling him, inevitably causing trouble for himself and others with his stubborn persistence and pitfalls.
Other days offer moments of triumph where an AI-driven dive into newspaper databases yields a nugget from 100 years ago that fills a gap in a story or the background of a historical figure that otherwise eluded my more conventional searches.
Many people in my circles — aging Baby Boomers, many retired and relying on life savings and investments to continue enjoying choice-enriched lifestyles — see AI as the latest, unfathomable technology revolution that either threatens those life savings or represents a Promised Land kind of economic leap forward. We are not sure, week to week, which future is more likely. Risk and reward have both been supercharged by artificial intelligence and the tech world’s accelerated pace of capital investment and growth.
AI confuses as many people as blockchain and cryptocurrency do. Others of us dive in, not that we necessarily know how to swim, but at least we understand currents and that you can either ride them or be swept up helplessly.
It’s Thanksgiving Week, a good time to leave aside politics and other divisive and polarizing realities as we enter the time of year when many of us make an extra effort to make the world a better place, and the most vulnerable among us just a bit less vulnerable if we can.
It occurs to me that AI might be able to supercharge these altruistic instincts so many of us share this time of year. In fact, I’m convinced it can accomplish that task. Just don’t ask me to explain how.
Maybe you can. Happy Thanksgiving.
Bob Rivard
Host, bigcitysmalltown
Robert “Bob” Rivard is a veteran American journalist whose 46-year career has taken him across Texas, Latin America, and beyond. He co-founded the Rivard Report (later named the San Antonio Report) with his wife, Monika Maeckle, in 2012, building it into the city’s leading nonprofit news organization before retiring in 2022.
Bob has worked for five Texas newspapers, beginning his career on the border at the Brownsville Herald, then moving to the Corpus Christi Caller, the Dallas Times-Herald, and later serving as a foreign correspondent and chief of correspondents for Newsweek. He returned to Texas as senior editor of the San Antonio Light before becoming executive editor of the San Antonio Express-News (1997–2011).
His journalism has earned widespread recognition, including being named Editor & Publisher’s “Editor of the Year” in 2000 and receiving the prestigious Maria Moors Cabot Award from Columbia University for his reporting on Latin America and the U.S.-Mexico border.
He is the author of Trail of Feathers, a nonfiction book chronicling the disappearance and murder of journalist Philip True in Mexico’s Sierra Madre. The book, published by Public Affairs in 2005, was widely reviewed, excerpted in Esquire, and selected by People magazine as one of five recommended nonfiction works that year.
Bob now hosts bigcitysmalltown, a podcast featuring the people shaping San Antonio’s future. He and Monika live in Southtown, where she runs the Texas Butterfly Ranch blog and previously founded the annual San Antonio Monarch Butterfly and Pol… Read More
