I just went through a funny situation involving my mother and her partner, both of whom are around 60 years old. She's been planning this trip to Italy for a while now, and has been doing all the research manually, which has understandably taken a lot of work and effort. Then I showed her how to use ChatGPT (3.5). For the past like 3 hours she's been chatting with it, asking dozens of questions, and every time it brings back an informative and well-written reply, she gets more and more jovial and excited. She's telling me how she can spend the whole night not sleeping and just talking to it, and it made me think how much differently the elder population experience this sudden and major shift in our technological landscape.
LLMs have been on the rise for a while now, but currently I believe models like GPT and Gemini are advanced enough to seem like absolute magic to people of the previous generations. I haven't seen my mother this excited and amazed by something in a while, and it's hard for me to explain to her that this is just the beginning of a shift in the collective consciousness and our innate integration with technology that is about to come in the following decades. It's hard for me to imagine what our world woud look like in 10 years, and I'm a software developer myself. Seeing how difficult it is for her to imagine it makes me realize how big of a difference there is in perspective between mine and her generation. And then there's my grandmother, who recently hit 80, who is wholly incapable of putting this type of technology into perspective and glimpsing even the slightest sliver of understanding of how it works.
It's a peculiar thing, isn't it? How novel and odd technologies appear to people of the older generation, almost as if magic. Reminds me of how people react to the psychedelic realm when they encounter it for the first time, and how the moment everything clicks together and starts making sense appears literally like magic.
I often imagine myself in 20-30 years, being in the same position. So caught up in life that I've lost track on the current technological developments to the point where stuff happening around me seems incomprehensible, almost like magic. And then I ask myself, would others around me feel about me the same way I feel about elders around me right now. Would they pity me? Would they ignore me?
Just some thoughts, nothing serious.
LLMs have been on the rise for a while now, but currently I believe models like GPT and Gemini are advanced enough to seem like absolute magic to people of the previous generations. I haven't seen my mother this excited and amazed by something in a while, and it's hard for me to explain to her that this is just the beginning of a shift in the collective consciousness and our innate integration with technology that is about to come in the following decades. It's hard for me to imagine what our world woud look like in 10 years, and I'm a software developer myself. Seeing how difficult it is for her to imagine it makes me realize how big of a difference there is in perspective between mine and her generation. And then there's my grandmother, who recently hit 80, who is wholly incapable of putting this type of technology into perspective and glimpsing even the slightest sliver of understanding of how it works.
It's a peculiar thing, isn't it? How novel and odd technologies appear to people of the older generation, almost as if magic. Reminds me of how people react to the psychedelic realm when they encounter it for the first time, and how the moment everything clicks together and starts making sense appears literally like magic.
I often imagine myself in 20-30 years, being in the same position. So caught up in life that I've lost track on the current technological developments to the point where stuff happening around me seems incomprehensible, almost like magic. And then I ask myself, would others around me feel about me the same way I feel about elders around me right now. Would they pity me? Would they ignore me?
Just some thoughts, nothing serious.
