as time goes by, it's hard for humans not to reminisce about the past. i should be looking for a study to back this up first, but i have a feeling like there are some biological reasons for why this happens. so basically, everybody does it. i do it too.
and as a sign of the universality of such a tendency, the hymns of the epic of gilgamesh — the oldest story we know of, dating back to more than 4000 years ago — starts with something to the effect: "this story happened back in good olden days, when the ovens of bread were first lit". yep, even the authors of the first story ever reminisced about the "old golden age".
the problem though is that a lot of people get carried away to the point where they judge everything new they come across by the standards of their (perceived) past glory times. this happens both on the personal level as well as on a collective level, to varying degrees.
on a personal level, this results in people refusing to let go of former lovers, passed away family members, etc. for them, moving on feels like a betrayal, which locks them in temporal holding cells, and renders them unable to live their lives to the fullest.
always on a personal level, this over-attachment to the past may manifest itself as a refusal to adopt new ways of thinking, or to learn new, more efficient tools and/or methods. "that's how i learnt to do it" we often hear such people reject any hint at updating their ways of doing things. it doesn't require an expert to guess that such people get left behind by those who are willing to shed old skills when the time comes.
this clinging to older methods isn't exclusive to the individual though. companies, big and small, end up belly up when they refuse, as groups of workers, to let the way they do business be influenced by current requirements and insist, despite the blaring signs of doom, to answer only to the needs of a past long gone that for some reason, can only be seen in the rear-view mirror.
unfortunately, such stubbornness scales very easily and very well to the level of nations. in fact, it is common to see nations shun progress and wealth in the name of loyalty to the "golden age". millions of people, if not billions, are suffering every day just because of imaginary restrictions that we strap ourselves with, without anybody imposing them on us.
what a tragedy.
as for myself, i try to avoid falling into this trap. whenever something new comes up, i always try to embrace it, or at least to understand why it came to be in the first place. it only took me days to find ways to integrate ai into my daily routines and to release me from some tedious tasks.
history is a good tool for this too. trying to compare the current transition with ones from distant history helps me see parallels between those who resisted past evolutions (and are obviously wrong now thanks to hindsight), and today's skeptics.
let's take writing as an example. for thousands of years and up until months ago, writing really nice morsels of prose was a skill that only a very few mastered. when chatgpt first appeared, the prospects of delegating what appeared to be a fundamentally human task to a machine seemed so outrageous. funny even. but we should remember that when the printing press first appeared, it faced huge resistance despite its obvious benefits to us today, writing, at the time, was considered a quintessential human activity. good handwriting was a very elite skill that only a few mastered in every society that developed writing.
at the time, seeing such a very complex skill being replaced by machines seemed outrageous.
this is happening again now. but seeing from the lens of past evolutions makes it much more easy to see how writing, just like scribing before it, can now be delegated to machines so that we, the humans, can focus on tasks that require more of what only humans are capable of as of now.
it's important to note that resistance to change is not the only thing that slows our adoption of new tech. our brains are also to blame.
at first, even me, an avid early adopter to ai, find it difficult to adopt the new technology and incorporate it into my daily routine. my brain, trained on years of the old way of doing things, couldn't liberate itself from the shackles of the old ways. whenever i was trying to imagine new ways to take fully advantage of the new capabilities of ai, i can feel my brain struggle to think of any other way, other than the ones it used to execute such tasks for years. just like any other thing with the brain, constant exposure and practice helped bit by bit adopt new paradigms that got me closer to taking full advantage of the many amazing ai models floating today.
but this doesn't only apply to newly developed technologies. people also throw a collective tantrum when the new generations choose to entertain themselves in ways that didn't exist for those who came before them. even the millennials, who were themselves mocked for embracing youtube, are doing the same thing to newer humans choosing to go for tiktoks and instagram reels. people somehow forget, or aren't aware, that the reason they feel youtube, or the television before it, or the radio before that, etc. is better than what comes next to it, is not inherent to the medium itself. what they mistake as a sign of superiority is mere nostalgia to the time when they were themselves younger, and probably free(r) from the pressures of adulthood.
be careful though: adapting new viable tech and solutions doesn't mean one need to fall to every over-hyped new widget thrown at them. nft anyone? for that, one question helps me a lot avoid these: what added value does this new thing add to the market? if the answer is elusive even after a good session of deep research, chances are that it simply doesn't exist and that what you are being presented is nothing more than a sophisticated snake oil.
see you tomorrow.