I'm From the Days of Landline Phones. I Didn't Expect to Be Alive for This — Don't Let AI Run Past You

I say this to my friends so often it's become my line: I can't believe I'm alive to see this. If you'd asked me even a few years ago, I'd have told you AI like this was a hundred years away. But here I am — here we are — lucky enough to see it.

I don't say that as a wide-eyed newcomer. I've spent four decades in technology, and at 63 I build and run AI systems for a living. I watched the personal computer arrive, then the internet, then the smartphone — each one impressive, each one roughly on schedule. This one jumped the line. A machine that reads, writes, explains, and converses in ordinary English was not supposed to happen in my lifetime. It happened anyway.

We can see this more clearly than the young

Here's something I believe that you'll rarely hear, because the people who write about technology are mostly too young to feel it: you can't measure how big this is unless you've seen the old world.

I'm from the days of landline phones — one per household, bolted to the wall, a busy signal if you were unlucky. My parents used to talk about the excitement of the telephone and television, because those miracles arrived in their lifetime, and they never stopped marveling. I've known family members who began life without indoor plumbing — and lived to see the world in their pocket.

So when a younger person shrugs at AI — "it's just a chatbot" — I understand. To someone born with a smartphone in hand, this is the next app in an endless series of apps. They're not foolish; they simply haven't seen the before. We have. People our age are the ones who carry the full distance — from the phone on the wall to a machine you can talk with about anything — and that distance is the only honest way to measure what just happened. We're the ones holding the tape.

That's not nostalgia. It's a advantage: wonder is motivating, and we have earned more of it than anyone.

"It's like a dream" — but a usefully specific one

I don't mean science-fiction abstractions. I mean things you can do this afternoon:

• Paste a confusing insurance letter into a free AI assistant and say, "explain this to me in plain English" — then ask it four follow-up questions without it ever sighing.
• Speak your text messages instead of pecking them out on glass.
• Take a faded photograph of your parents from 1962 and watch your phone restore it.
• Show a suspicious text to an AI and ask, "is this a scam?" — and get a better answer than most of us would give.

I keep an honest, hype-free list of these in the five AI things actually worth your time. None of them require new equipment. All of them are free or nearly so.

The easiest technology you've ever been handed

And here is the part that should change your mind if you've quietly decided this isn't for you.

Every previous technology made you learn its language. The VCR blinked 12:00 at an entire generation. Computers wanted commands, then menus inside menus, then settings hidden behind gear icons. Some of us climbed those walls for a career; plenty of sensible people looked at the wall and reasonably said no thanks.

AI is the first technology in history that learns your language instead. You talk to it the way you'd talk to a patient, knowledgeable friend — full sentences, plain English, half-formed questions welcome. There is nothing to memorize and no wrong way to start. If you can leave a voicemail, you are fully qualified.

The cruel irony is that the generation best equipped to appreciate this — and most served by its patience — is the one being told, mostly by silence, that it isn't for them.

Don't let it run past you

Some people our age let the internet pass them by in the 1990s. Not a judgment — it looked optional at the time. But the ones who waited spent the next twenty years paying for it: locked out of cheaper fares, faster answers, family photo streams, half the conversation at dinner. The lesson isn't "technology punishes the slow." It's that catching up late costs far more than starting early, and starting early has never been this cheap.

I'm not asking you to become a technologist. I'm suggesting twenty minutes: pick one thing from the list and try it today.

Keep your eyes open while you do — where there's wonder, there are salesmen, and where there are salesmen there are scammers. That's the other half of why this site exists: the scams aimed at us, named and defanged, in plain English.

But don't let the con artists or the hype merchants own this moment, because it isn't theirs. We saw the old world. We get to see this one too. It's like a dream — and you don't have to watch it through the window.