The Internet is a wonderous place! How did we ever manage without it?
If we were inquisitive enough to want to find something out, we had to go in search of books, yes these heavy things with paper pages.
We had a copy of Encyclopaedia Brittanica in our house and it was well thumbed. When we wanted to cook a new dish, we had to browse through recipe books, I had hundreds of them.
The living rooms in our houses contained book racks and lined most of the walls. The previous editor-in-chief of this august organ George Williams had a large room with all the walls filled with books. It was his library, his pride and joy, and he would spend hours in there.
When you were young and acquired your first car you could not afford garage bills, so you bought the relevant Haynes workshop manual which explained in great detail, with photos, how to repair everything from a blown fuse to a seized engine.
Then a few technical nerds in universities started connecting computers together, Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented something called HTML and before we knew it YouTube videos were showing us how to do everything from dancing a tango to replacing the front left MacPherson strut on a Ford Escort mk3.
Books were now redundant except as decoration we discovered blank walls behind the bookcases and so had to go to Ikea to buy pictures of cats. Bookshops and libraries went out of business and closed down as we switched to eBook readers and Wikipedia.
But has it made our life better? Well, Yes. My idea of a perfect holiday is to lie on a sofa or lounger somewhere warm with a good book, I used to have to take a spare bag just for the books but now I have hundreds of them on my Kindle and if I want a new one then it takes a few clicks.
Want to know something then Google or Wikipedia is your friend. Which at first I found very annoying. You see I used to be one of these annoying nerds who knows everything. I understood that if you had no idea about something, but you made a statement with enough authority then everyone accepted it as true. Then one day some annoying little chap piped up that ‘according to Google’ what I had just said was a load of nonsense. So, I quickly dropped that persona and now I join everybody else in seeing who can be the first to find the answer on our phones.
It is not just the online searches that help, the Internet has things on there called forums where people with something in common share their knowledge back-and-forth to the benefit of all members. This works particularly well with cars. Over the years I have solved many problems with cars by posting the issue on a forum and someone answering that they had the same problem and telling me how they solved it. Saved me many dinars in garage fees.
And now we have AI. I use Chat GPT for almost everything, but I am painfully aware that I only scratch the surface of what it is capable of.
When the Internet burst on the scene very few people knew what to do with it. The ones that did are now billionaires. The people who figure out how best to use AI will become trillionaires. I just wish I could think of something.
jackie@jbeedie.com
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