In so many little ways our country has changed in my life time. I often think of my wife’s grandfather who grew up as a Mississippi farm boy in the early 1900’s. He once tried to explain to me the work differences between oxen, horses and mules. I could not help but think of the recent tug-of-war demonstration Elon Musk put on with his new electric Cybertruck and a Ford F-150.  Who would have thought 20 years ago that an electric truck could take on the Ford, Chevy and Dodge gas guzzling giants in a tractor pull. I can imagine constructions workers bantering with each other in a bullying way over beers on which pickup truck was better for hauling or towing but I am sure electric trucks never entered the debate.  In our information age this would be equivalent of techno geeks pontificating on the qualities and drawbacks between computing capabilities of Notebooks, Macs,  Microsoft or any devices with an operating system.

But Paw, as we called him, lived long enough to see the beginning of the computer age.  He saw it but never really experienced it. He grew up fighting in the Great War and spent a year in France. Something new for a lot of country boys living in the Roaring 20’s with The Great Gatsby which would soon turn into To Have and Have Not during the Great Depression. If they lived long enough, they saw the world go from prices stamped onto products to scanning bar codes at the grocery store check-out line. They literally went from horse-and-buggy to landing on the Moon and the Space Shuttle.

That generation is all but gone. I am not sure if they had nickname except maybe “old fogies,” a term, which now, could be considered close to a hate crime or in the same category as a gender or racial slur.  I am not sure if the newly coined, “okay boomer” is descriptive or derogatory. The debate is on.

We boomers, too, have seen a thing or two and as of late it seems like things are moving a lot faster than plodding team of oxen on a Mississippi dirt road in August. I have seen it go from where a smart man carried a pocket knife with two blades and a can and bottle opener folded in there somewhere. The more sophisticated man’s knife would have a cork screw on it for that bottle of Chardonnay casually consumed on picnic blanket under a shade tree with your best girl. That was a time before pop top cans and twist off bottle caps.  Wine always had a cork and did not come in a box. I would not be surprised that in the very near future somebody comes up with some sort of app to open tough tightly lidded or shrink-wrapped products. I mean how many people today even carry pocket knives. But their phone is loaded with apps  that can book a flight, pay for the flight, and then get them on the plane.

 

 

Who thought life could get better than pop top cans, and twist off Coke bottles? But it does. Just look at our old rotary dial phones with party lines. The first rotary phone came out in 1892 but it was not until 1963 that we went from dialing to push buttons. As Sonny and Cher would sing: and the beat goes on. Those land lines are still around but have been replaced with multiple iterations of wireless smart phones. Gone are long distance operators and rollover minutes.

According to the website SimpleTexting the first smart phone was an IBM  Simon Personal Communicator It came out in 1994 and looked like a slim version of a World War II walkie talkie. It could send and receive emails and faxes and “It even featured standard and predictive stylus input screen keyboards.” I have a feeling I should know what that is but don’t. When it comes to this sort technology, even 1994 era stuff,  I’m swimming in the shallow end of the techno pond.

 

The smart phone, in my opinion is a perfect example of peanut butter and jelly innovation. Before there could be a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the world needed sliced bread. The basic ingredients for the sandwich were present. Just like there have always been radio waves.  It just took technology awhile to catch up. It is the old “what ya gonna do with it” innovation that has made America always great.

Peanut butter was around in the early 1890’s and was actually considered couture and not a food staple of the masses. Bread has been around for centuries.  However,  it took sliced bread to bring all three ingredients together.  In 1928. Otto Rohwedder brought in the new age of sliced bread with the first automatic bread slicing machine. An invention that gave us the modern Deli and maybe even ushered in the concept of fast food.

 

 

It is really is insane to compare the smart phone to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.   Maybe it is more like the clock radio, which came out in the 1940’s. Combine the average alarm clock with a radio and life just gets better. The smart phone, like the clock radio and the sandwich, was out there just waiting to be developed.  It just took some innovation to bring them together. For instance, the first iPhone came out in June of 2007.  We are now up to 11 models and 5Gs. Phones with cameras and instant communication and apps that do just about everything for us but tie our shoes. People don’t go out of the house without the damned thing plastered to their faces or some sort of ear piece pushed into their ears. States have had to enact laws to curb people from using their smart phones and driving at the same time. A non alcoholic DUI. We love our smart phones. Now the  peanut-butter-and-jelly science is leading us to the innovation  of a smart car.

 

I do not think my first mobile phone had any Gs. It was a little analogue device that my wife called a noisy cricket. A neat feature was the various animal sounds you could choose for ring tones. I liked the Dolphin.  The little thing was about the size of the hand phaser that Captain Kirk zapped Klingons with in Star Trek.  It did everything my landline did without a wire but with text messaging and a voice mailbox.  Texting gave me the opportunity to communicate with people and not have to actually talk to them and the voice mail box meant I didn’t have to answer the phone at all. One drawback though, was the noisy cricket had no emojis. It is hard to imagine a time without emojis. Who could live in world devoid of such creatures.  It hearkens back to the dark ages when a P & J sandwich was waiting to come between two pieces of Wonder Bread.

 

But life does get even better than sliced bread.  Today’s technology allows us to call anybody within radius of a cell tower and a satellite link.  And if that is not enough we can now talk to people face-to-face.  But what is really great, is we can talk to the phone itself.  I cannot count the times I have screamed at some dumb insubordinate machine thinking that my tirade would bring it into some sort of compliance with my wishes. Now the phone is like Aladdin in a lamp. It is science and Arabian fantasy brought together—another peanut butter and jelly moment!  It is almost like having your very own Genie.  I think it would be neat, though, that when you summon Suri or some other so-called artificially intelligent speaking machine that they answer with, “Yes. Master. Your wish is my command.” The reason I say this is I just do not trust machines to comply with my wishes.

I first ran into this at an early age. My dad always thought I was lazy because I could never get any of his lawn mowers to start. Yes, my motivation to get one started was low but I really think I was meant to live in the age of the hammer and sickle, the era of  real  bricks and mortar. In a time when they actually stacked one brick on-top-of-two. A time when the goat took care of the lawn. A time before bricks and mortar was not meant to differentiate between a store front business and an online business.

As an “Okay, Boomer” I grew up reading dystopian novels like Alex Huxley’s Brave New World, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and  George Orwell’s 1984. “Big Brother is watching.” My luck with dumb machines and a my dystopian view of them has created a deep distrust of machines that goes beyond any sort belief in the deep state.  It concerns me that a machine with artificial intelligence can out-think me.  It raises some real concerns because it really does not require much effort to out-think me. I have never fired on all synapses and now machines that can process information faster than me is the norm. And I am not just talking about playing computer chess.

 

I am not sure where things are going. Because what boomer can forget the recalcitrant, malfunctioning artificial intelligent computer HAL 9000 in the Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. When commanded by a space-walking astronaut to “open the pod bay doors” to let him back into the space ship, HAL responds with a cool mechanical voice: “Sorry Dave I cannot do that.” What the heck do you mean you cannot do that? HAL was going to leave Dave’s human butt out in deep space because he, HAL, had a better grip on what was going on with their mission. And I use the word their because at what point will we start cohabiting the planet with smarter-than-human machines?

It goes beyond traffic lights telling us when we can go and when we should stop.  Machines that have a better so-called understanding of what is going on are taking the peanut butter and jelly sandwich innovation and putting it in the realm of cognitive mental mischief. We may be setting ourselves up to a real dystopian moment.  To paraphrase the classic Blues song: It ain’t no fun when the Robot’s got the gun.” 

 

https://simpletexting.com/where-have-we-come-since-the-first-smartphone/

https://www.seriouseats.com/2007/04/the-history-of-the-peanut-butt.html

https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-03-31/pastrami-rye-full-length-history-new-york-jewish-deli