AI & newborns: when change is inevitable

 (606 words)

There weren’t many but there were enough of them that I had the sarcastic retort holstered and ready to be drawn.

It was 24 years ago and Val was about to deliver our first baby. We were unaware of the sex, but in what is now one of the lamest “Spoiler alerts!” that child was a female, born September 25, 2000. We named her Joslyn Rachel Rodell.

But right up to the moment she was born, she was a vast unknown, a vast 7-pound unknown. So many questions.

Boy or girl? Curly or straight haired? Savior or Satan?

That last one became a category after a handful of friends would greet the otherwise joyous news as if we expectant parents were being sent to a Siberian gulag for stealing a peach.

Their eyes shone with gleeful prophesy; their tone was one of vengeance spared not.

“So you’re having a baby. Ahhh …” Now, cue the cackle: ‘Boy, are your lives gonna change!’”

It became for me a hanging curve.

“Whew, boy, am I glad to hear it — ‘cause up til now, our lives have really, really sucked!”

It’s for lines like that that sarcasm was invented by, I think, a war-weary French soldier in response to Napoleon’s 1815  rally cry of, “We take Waterloo and the world is ours. Who’s with me!”

See, our lives had not sucked. Au contraire. We enjoyed travel, attending concerts, fancy dinners, and quiet nights at home reading or watching movies.

It was a very happy time.

So we found out the very first night our antagonists had been correct. Our lives really did charge.

They got better.

Much better. It’s impossible to gauge how happy being the father of darling Josie — and Lucinda Grace in ’06 — have made me.

Today, man, it’s been 24 years, bolstering my contention that time doesn’t fly. It drives a Maserati drunk down the Autobahn with a brick strapped to the gas pedal. 

But, oh, those 24 years. Old pictures pop up here and there and I see me smiling with those little girls in my arms and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a picture of a happier human.

Me!

The joyful memories are indelible. I’ve always been a happy fellow, but having our kids changed everything. They made it so much better.

I was thinking of those changes because I’ve allowed myself to descend into melancholy over the doomsday scenarios involving the inevitability that one day soon Artificial Intelligence would really, really change the world.

It would improve our existence or, whoop-sie-daisy, end it.

We can make a strong argument that our time is up. There’s war, climate change, ancient tribal hatreds, and on and on and …

Good riddance!

But what if they’re wrong? What if the reverse happens and AI ushers in a golden age where debilitating diseases are vanquished, leisure activities are allowed to flourish, and we all see ourselves and one another through appreciative new eyes.

I hope those are the benign kind of changes that surprise us.

So let’s not give into despondency over changes and consequences none of us can see.

Because being a living, breathing human being is still pretty sweet thing. 

Despite our world of woe, we can still enjoy watching a nail-biter at PNC Park, a fine meal on Pittsburgh’s Mt. Washington, and a night of romantic snuggling that’ll lead to the creation of one of those tiny, messy, wailing organisms the killjoys say will really change things.

Change is coming.

With so much division we need to understand that us being all wrong can still turn out all right.

I say we embrace change.

Because up til now, things have really, really sucked.