TheMiichaelBeebe

In the world, we seem to have a big breakthrough every twenty to thirty years that truly changes mankind. We had the internet, the space shuttle, nuclear energy, nuclear bomb, flight all around twenty to thirty years apart. Some times are slightly shorter but it’s not like we have world changing technology on a daily or yearly basis. It seems like the world then gravitates to those inventions and focuses on them. Today it’s artificial intelligence.

Yesterday was the second anniversary of the best man I have ever known, my father. It still lingers with me. In November of 2021 my father had a relatively debilitating stroke and passed eight or so months later after a steady decline, on June 30th, 2022. Apparently they have ways to tell if you’ve had one before and the doctors said he had one previously. He and his wife, my stepmother, were at Walmart doing their weekly grocery shopping and he got light headed and his leg stopped working right. My dad’s thinking was to walk it off and went to the car while she finished the shopping. He was fine. He just needed to take a nap at home. He was fine. The second one he was less fortunate, but 80 years old and he smoked 2 packs a day from the time he was 16, worked at a steel mill that gave him a weird coating on his lungs that the doctor couldn’t identify, survived Vietnam, ate red meat most of his life, and was a lifelong moderate drinker; he lived a long life.

My mother and I were watching TV once back while I was in college or around that age and there was a kid saying “my daddy is my hero.” My mother wanted to have a family bonding moment and asked if my father was my hero. He wasn’t and I made the mistake of being honest with her. She. Was. Pissed. I hate when people talk about safe spaces because I and my generation had to grow up with the reality that no one cares how you feel. My parents never gave me the safety to express myself. They would ask questions and say they wanted my honest opinion then be angry with me for not thinking the way they thought. My mother, when I was 14 or 16 (around that age) wanted Sunday dinner to be us discussing a different topic where I could openly express myself. I don’t know what parenting magazine she read that in, but my beliefs were invalidated and was told how I was wrong. Yeah. That was always something to look forward to. Don’t get me wrong, my parents and my childhood were great and we all deal with some shit.

My father and his brother-in-law / best friend opened a gas station. They got a contract with Gulf and borrowed $2,500 and it was opened. They had a loan and Gulf secured the rest of the loan with the bank. They were in business but profit margins were small. They both made good money at it but based on them working all the hours themselves and they hired one person who took care of the garage area. They made good money but then my father got drafted and his brother-in-law ran everything. He had to hire a couple people who ended up being thieves. My mother would work there when she could but she had a full time job. Ultimately the business failed while my father was on a government-sponsored all expenses paid vacation to Vietnam. He wanted to be a business owner and was and the government took that away from him. After he got back home, they paid back the $2,500 loan to his mother, and got a job at the steel mill where he sweated his ass off every day to make money and support his family. It was an honorable choice but not what he wanted for me. If that’s what he wanted for, he wouldn’t have paid for me to go to college. My father isn’t my hero because he didn’t want to be. He wanted me to find hero’s he thought were more deserving.

In 1992 the internet came out. It was developed before that and modems were nothing new, but constantly active servers with information on them and freely available to the masses was new. My father was never interested in learning it. My mother, though passed 21 years ago, would still be able to find things on search engines I wouldn’t even know how to search today. She understood SEO before the words existed and had an intuitive understanding of how to do searches. My father thought demons may live in the box on the desk. I was 17 when it came out and 18 in 1993 when we got a real computer and internet access. Everyone walking around has had 30 years to learn to use the internet and those who haven’t have chosen to remain ignorant of it. My father chose to not learn it. If he had been in his right mind, I don’t know that he would have been able to pay his bills in the last years since so much is online or requires an email address.

Today (ish) is thirty years after the internet came out for consumer use and with now we have the emergence of artificial intelligence, which I have embraced. I’m around the age my father was when he rejected the internet and I can’t be like that. I saw my dad lost in a world of technology and I promised myself I would never be that irrelevant. I have learned how to prompt GhatGTP to get the answers to questions that I want instead of simply general answers without context. I understand its limitations and I follow its progress.

My father was a great man and I loved the old man, but my father is also a cautionary tale. Learn all you can about artificial intelligence because it will be a tool you need over the next thirty years in this world. Without it, you will be lost.

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