Technonovelty

I am, however I look at it, getting quite old.

I’m old enough to remember the 1970s and the Christmas present I received, a CBM Electronic Calculator. I was amazed by how I could enter numbers and symbols, and the machine would return correct calculations.

I’m old enough to remember the first experience at home of colour television, which my parents purchased on the 8th March 1980, so that I could watch the highlights of Watford versus Arsenal. We lost 2-1, and I’m old enough to have also lost track of footballing disappointments.

I’m old enough to remember getting to grips with the BBC Micro and learning how to control the beast through the magic of the BASIC programming language.

I’m old enough to be enthralled by networked connectivity, logging into early bulletin board systems using a 300 baud modem.

I’m old enough to have been amazed by the arrival of WIMP – windows and icons and menus and pointers – at home in the form of an Atari ST.

I’m old enough to have been captivated by CD-ROMs and the miracle of postage-stamp-sized video appearing on my computer screen.

I’m old enough to have been stunned by the World Wide Web and instantaneous connectivity to the entire world via the information superhighway. And then building my first website for the British Journal of Sociology in 1996.

I’m old enough to remember the glee I felt in 1999 when I connected my Nokia slider phone to the internet and downloaded a WAP page I’d created for the very first time.

I’m old enough to remember the sense of wonder that Friends Reunited gave me when I was able to reconnect with schoolmates with whom I’d lost touch.

I’m old enough to remember the connection that Twitter gave me before that dreadful man trashed it for everyone.

And yes, I’m old enough to remember the first sense of awe that LLMs gave me when I first used them, generating plausible text in ways that had not been seen before.

But I’m not old enough to have been surprised or enchanted by the car, or by trains or by cinema or by radio or by telephones. Those have all been given. They’ve existed for ages before me. They are just part of the fabric of life.

“What’s with all the reminiscing, Matt?” I hear you ask.

“Is it because next month you are old enough to start drawing on some of your pensions?”

How rude. No, it’s not that (and for the avoidance of doubt, I’ll not be retiring any time soon).

Earlier this week, I was reminded of the sense of wonder I had with that CBM calculator at Christmas in my granddad’s house in Suffolk.

And I wondered with my lunch companion if that was what we are seeing with LLMs at the moment (combined with a might of marketing spend never seen before). We are amazed by LLMs because they are novel. And that will pass as they become just another technology we take for granted.

But I also wonder if for the generations that have come into the workforce after me, particularly those for whom the Internet and Smartphones and Social networks are just technologies that are taken for granted, LLMs are their first really novel moment in tech? Sure, we had crypto and NFTs, but no normal people really understand the point of those, let alone get spellbound.

You can’t have a conversation with a blockchain.

This sense of novelty will pass. We will work out what LLMs are good for. We will also work out what they can’t do. Then another technology will come along and claim to solve all the problems that LLMs created. Because that’s the way technology waves work.

Just remember. They’re not magic. Just technology.