Editor’s note: In addition to following tech developments and innovation, our author is a musical composer (Juilliard-trained). He has provided a musical composition called “Tech Lever” for you to listen to while reading this column.
Many of us, of a certain age, began our professional lives under very different circumstances and with very different tools from those that exist today. None of us had cell phones, all of us had file cabinets, most of us had paper address books, and long-distance calls were both inconvenient and expensive. These are just the tip of the iceberg of new capabilities leveraged by technology.
Here is the question for all of you: Are you either ignoring or minimally accepting new tech tools, or are you actively embracing them for all their worth? If you are not embracing them, you are at a competitive disadvantage to those who are.
I know many people who began their professional lives with a typewriter because personal computers were not yet cost-effective enough to be widely afforded. Many of us also had secretaries or executive assistants who organized our lives and made them smooth-flowing. I don’t know anybody any longer who has this kind of assistance. But I do know a few things. First, I never was a very good typist because, as a physicist and engineer, I never thought I would need to learn how to type, not because I thought I would have a secretary, but because I assumed that speech recognition was right around the corner. I would be able to speak, and computers would do the typing for me. I never imagined it would take 50 years (and still not work so well). If I had known this, I would have learned to type. I didn’t know that the QWERTY layout of the keyboard was designed to slow down people when they typed so that their keys wouldn’t crash into each other and mangle the typewriter. I am still astounded that we use the same keyboard even though there is no longer any mechanical justification for it.
If you do a lot of writing, even if you are not a writer, you can benefit tremendously from using AI. AI tools make great spell- and grammar-checkers and editors. They also can reprioritize, summarize, expand, change tense, and do research.
For better or worse, speech transcription is also now with us. And some people have been using it for decades and have become very good at it, while others still ignore it. If you are not called upon to write much, or if you did learn typing when you were younger, then perhaps you can avoid this. But I, for one, know that speech recognition finally, after all these years, has come of age and now can type faster than I can, which admittedly may not be a very high bar. Still, I suspect that almost all the professionals I know did not take typing in high school, and we certainly did not take it in college.
It has taken a while, but I have finally adjusted my cadence to one that is slow enough for speech recognition to capture what I am trying to say. I have not yet found a way to use my voice for error correction: it is far too slow and inefficient, so I am still using some combination of speaking and fingers to straighten out what is wrong. I have had to bite the bullet and embrace speech recognition as a legitimate form of getting my words into a computer, but it was a battle.
Most of us are still caught up in some combination of digital and paper record-keeping, and even though we make attempts once in a while to go completely digital, these attempts often, if not usually, fail. If you are a contemporary of mine, do you still have four or more file cabinets? If so, I doubt your children have more than one, or that your grandchildren have any.
Our phones and laptops have many capabilities we are not taking advantage of. This might be a good time to take inventory of some of the things we know we could be doing but have been reluctant to try.
The extent to which we choose to embrace technology is a personal decision. Some friends rave about their self-driving cars, while others wouldn’t dream of buying one in a million years. I’m not suggesting you blindly embrace every piece of technology, but I believe some could significantly improve your life. And the big elephant in the room is, of course, artificial intelligence.
I was unwilling to embrace using AI until the last year or two. It is incredibly powerful and immeasurably useful and requires you to work differently. But if you are still professionally involved in the world, you really ought to be, at least, dipping your toe in the water because the people that you are competing with are undoubtedly doing it. They will have a gigantic competitive advantage if you pretend it doesn’t exist and or that you don’t need it.
Many initially resisted word processors, calculators, or even automatic transmissions. I resisted them even though I was technically trained and should have known better. I still enjoy driving a stick shift and don’t use a calculator because I take pride in doing math without a machine. I am not trying to promote any particular technology. Just consider that there are undoubtedly technologies that could make your life easier and smoother if you took the time to learn them. Yes, it takes time to become more adept at using some of the tech you probably already own, as all new processes require learning curves.
I know this is a potential black hole that can waste a lot of time, so I am not saying embrace all of it or try to figure out all the things you could be doing. I am saying just look for the pieces that could save you a lot of time and effort and that people around you are already routinely using to great advantage.
Evaluate the technology you already possess. Some items may be outdated or have such a poor user interface that it’s not worth your time to spend even five minutes on them. So let those go. However, some of this technology could save you hundreds of hours, enhance your competitiveness, and improve your quality of life. Technology is not the enemy, but it is not going away. Therefore, you may as well embrace the reality of a technologically leveraged life. If you have questions about what that means, observe your kids and grandkids; they all live a technologically leveraged life.
So yes, there is plenty to be frustrated about, but there is also an equal amount to be excited about. Connect some of your latent dreams and unused tech to liberate your next-gen life! Write that book you have been thinking about, relearn that instrument you played as a kid, or practice another language. You probably have just about everything you need in your possession already.
