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Here’s the cleaned up version. I kept your meaning, structure, and voice intact, and only fixed grammar, typos, punctuation, and clunky phrasing.

We as humans owe a great deal to technology. If I think back to when I was a senior in high school in 1989, so many things I take for granted today simply did not exist. Today, if I need a ride, I can use Uber or Lyft and do so in just about any town with a few thousand people. When I was a kid, if my car was not available, I had to bum a ride with a buddy. In my small town, even a taxi wasn’t available.

If I wanted to create a “playlist,” I either had to buy or borrow a bunch of tapes, then use a dual tape deck to make my “mix tape.” Either that or I had to stalk the local radio station and hope the DJ didn’t ruin the end of “that one song” by coming in before it was over. Today I have dozens of music services that all cost less per month than one album did in 1989. I can make any “mix tape” I want and carry every song in existence in my pocket.

Think of all the similar things. From paper maps we have moved to apps like Waze and Google Maps. In the 80s, a set of encyclopedias was 500 to 1,500 dollars and was out of date a few years after you finally paid it off. Oh, adjusted for inflation, that is 1,500 to over 4 grand, and a premium set of Encyclopaedia Britannica would set you back almost 18,000 dollars in today’s numbers. Today we have Wikipedia and the entire internet, and most people pay about 30 to 50 bucks a month for internet access.

How about movies? Remember VCRs? The cost of one movie or rental? Remember having to store them? Today, with a couple streaming services, you have access to almost everything ever made. With a bit of searching, you can even find a lot of it for free.

Now let’s talk about the elephant in the room, the latest addition to this tech stack we have seen built over the last 40 odd years, AI. We now have tools available for free that “do the thinking for you,” and for about 25 bucks a month that power drastically increases.

I have never been what you might call a Luddite or a technophobe, so I am not saying any of this is bad. In fact, in many ways we are blessed to live at a time when all this is available. Yet society is now divided into two main cohorts. People who knew the world before all this and people who haven’t. Recently we had an anniversary of 9/11, and a stat was released that I had never considered before. The stat was that about one third of people in the US today were not even alive on 9/11/01.

Now let’s add this reality. If you were, say, 12 years old in 2012, with the exception of AI and a few features on some social media sites, you’ve lived your entire life basically having all this technology. Now add that almost 20% of our population is over 65 and, while not all, most of those people are retired. Translation, about half of all working people, or those soon to enter the workplace, have never known a world without the internet, email, smartphone apps, etc.

So our question today is, what happens when Gen X and the older Millennials retire and die off? The answer, as we will discover, is neither all bad nor all good.

Join Me Today To Discuss…

• Previous disruptive technologies, their “positive fears” vs. their true outcomes
  • The Printing Press
    • Positive Fear – Institutions would lose control with the spread of knowledge and literacy
    • Actual Reality – While humanity greatly benefited and the instutitions changed, they are more powerful today than anytime in history
  • The Mechanical Clock
    • Positive Fear – Church and local elites feared standardized time would break spiritual rhythms and weaken their control over daily life
    • Actual Reality – Authorities built public clock towers to enforce strict work schedules, dramatically increasing institutional control over society
  • Electrical PowerPositive
    • Fear – Leaders feared that invisible energy grids would cause uncontrollable hazards and destroy traditional energy monopolies
    • Actual Reality – Centralized grids gave corporations and governments ultimate control to standardize industries and monitor labor around the clock
  • Digital Music
    • Positive Fear – Record labels feared piracy would bankrupt the entire music industry and permanently destroy the commercial value of art
    • Actual Reality – Centralized streaming platforms took over, giving tech monopolies and major labels absolute control over global distribution and listener data
  • The Internet
    • Positive Fear – Governments feared a decentralized web would permanently destroy their ability to censor information and control national narratives
    • Actual Reality – Big Tech and state actors built mass surveillance systems, data monopolies, and algorithms that manipulate public discourse at a global scale
  • For all we have gained aside from power staying in control, what have we lost
    • The ability to navigate without technology
    • A huge loss of real world communication ability
    • The ability to network IRL
    • A massive hit to the average persons mechanical ability including the ability to trouble shoot
    • Deep focused reading comprehension
    • Local subcultures have taken a huge hit in favor of global virtual affinity groups
    • A loss of physical spatial awareness and mental mapping
    • We have drastically reduced our peaceful contemplation time
    • And many more
  • How this impacts the workplace
    • No one understands the necessary work arounds
    • A lack of early careers developing “muscle memory” (loss of the mail room)
    • People who think they know more than they do with way too much confidence
    • A lack of patience in the “coming up years” and understanding paying your dues
    • A strong desire by many to avoid physical work at all costs
  • Will AI make this all worse, be neutral or make us better, it is going to be an individual choice
  • Honestly AI is the part of the movie Idiocracy that everyone misses
    • People will either use AI to do the same work in less time or do more and better work
    • People we either lean on AI to answer questions when needed or use it to create self directed education programs
    • People will use AI to create communications or use AI to develop a better ability to communicate
    • Average people will do more work with AI, but smart people will use AI to rise well above average or even what we currently call gifted
  • The harsh reality
    • The skill gaps are growing and real
    • Both water and humans tend to the path of least resistance
    • The last of the old guard only has about 20-30 real working years left (vast majority)
    • Just like prior disruptions the positive fears will likely not come to pass, but the negatives are likely
    • Those who most effectively use AI today, already know what success without it looks like
  • What can you do about this
    • Accept the death of the green light and ignore the herd
    • When using AI use it to learn how not just have it do things for you
    • Even the things you can automate do manually once in a while
    • Focus on your physical and emotional health
    • Yes it is an over used meme but touch grass!
      • Beyond the direct meaning, do things with real people in real life
      • Travel, explore and learn about the world with doing
    • Set goals, back them with standards and enforce those standards or they are just suggestions
    • If you are parent you need to teach this mindset to your kids, grandkids, etc.
  • The new frontier is here, the last 40 years were only leading up to it, we don’t know what comes next
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