Some thoughts on obsolescence by Aaron Hecht

(Authors note: This blog is a kind of post-script to my previous blog about Artificial Intelligence. Also, this blog is long, but there's a payoff at the end, which I hope will make it worth it to have read the entire thing.)

An incident which occurred recently has brought to mind, a few weeks earlier than usual, a memory that comes up every year for me as we approach the graduation season. 

My own graduation from college was a happy occasion. On that day, I walked across the stage and accepted my diploma as my parents and my professors looked on, beaming with pride. The chair of the Political Science Department, from whom I had taken almost half of my classes, also had a hint of sadness in his eyes as he smiled at me, and after the ceremony, he came over to meet my parents and told them how proud they should be of me and so on, but then he leaned in, touched me gently on the arm and invited me to come see him in his office the next day after lunch, before moving off to talk to other people.

The next day after lunch my parents would be leaving for the airport, so I was free to go meet "Dr. B" as his students affectionately called him.

Dr. B's graduation day gown was still hanging up in the open closet next to his desk but otherwise there was nothing in the office to indicate that it was anything other than a normal workday for him. He was the kind of teacher whose greatest joy in life was to help his students help themselves, but he wasn't the only one in the building that day preparing for the summer session, which would start in a few weeks.

I sat down in front of his desk, where I had sat many times before over the previous four years, as he began to speak. He told me once again how proud he was of me, and he asked me some general questions about what I planned to do next and so on. Then, he got really quiet for a few moments, looking down at his desk, and I could tell he was struggling to find the right words to say what was on his mind. Experience told me to be patient, and eventually he'd have something to say that I'd be glad I got the opportunity to hear.

After a few moments, he began to speak once again, and although it was almost 30 years ago, I can still hear what he said in my mind as clearly as I did that day.

He said; "Aaron, you are one of the best students I ever had, and I'm not just saying that. I've been teaching here for 32 years. Most of the kids who come through here don't try very hard to learn anything. They just do the minimum to get by and they don't care about learning anything and after they graduate, I quickly forget about them and I'm not sorry to see them go. But you really made the most of your time here, it was a pleasure to have you in my classes, and I'm VERY sorry to see you go."

He paused for a moment, and I could see he was struggling again, but soon he continued and said words I'll never forget.

"Aaron, there's something else that makes me very sad today, because the fact is...well...I'm afraid the degree you earned here is already obsolete."

I sat there utterly stunned for a few seconds before he continued.

"Y'see Aaron, with this internet thing (the internet was still pretty new back then) everything I've taught you over the past four years is going to be available soon to anyone who needs it at the click of a mouse. Your knowledge, all the information you know, and all the books you've read and all the lectures you've sat through and taken notes and all that, it's all out there for anyone who wants it, any time they need it. I'd be pretty surprised if you will even be able to get a job teaching social studies in a high school. I think in ten years or less, universities like this one will all be shut down and maybe high schools too. They might still have elementary schools for young children, just to teach them the basics before giving them a computer, but I think 8th grade is going to be the max and then everyone's going to just be done with school."

I sat there with my mouth open, utterly speechless, having no idea what to say, but he wasn't done. He went on to tell me that he'd be retiring in a few more years, and he was sure he was going to be among the last teachers to spend a career in the classroom and make it to a comfortable retirement. He felt sorry for the younger profs in the department who probably wouldn't have enough in their pension accounts to retire and would have to figure something else out. He also felt VERY sorry for me, as I was just starting out in life and would probably struggle a lot to find work that paid enough to live on (he wasn't wrong about that part.)

He also said, before he let me go, that he didn't want me to be completely despondent because if I could find a way to make the internet work for me, I still had a chance to have a happy, successful life. But, he cautioned me, I needed to understand that although I had completed my formal schooling, my education would never end. I needed to continue reading books and otherwise learning in order to stay one step ahead of the competition. He used his thumb to point to the enormous number of books he had on the shelves behind his desk and told me that most of them he'd read after he graduated, and he continued to read two or three books a month, just to stay on top of things in his own profession. I would probably need to read even more, he cautioned me, and I should also make use of the internet to find and get more information to stay current on everything. That, he said, is the only way I could continue to be relevant and employable until I reached the age of retirement myself.

And then, having rendered unto his star pupil this final lesson, Dr. B once again shook my hand and told me to get out there and be a successful human being.

Well, all these years later, it's obvious that Dr. B's eulogy for the traditional education system, and all the ramifications it would have for the economy and me personally, was premature. In any case, I ended up going into journalism, not teaching, so even if he had been right about that part, it wouldn't have necessarily been as bad for me as he thought it was going to be. 

But he wasn't wrong about everything he told me that day, and in some ways, I'm starting to think that he wasn't actually wrong at all, just slightly ahead of his time.

I DID take his advice and ever since graduating from college, I have continued to buy and read an enormous quantity of books. Since moving to Israel almost 25 years ago I've probably spent close to $3,000 or more on such books, and I've been given many more as gifts. I've also read hundreds of pages worth of PDF files published by think tanks here in Israel, listened to thousands of hours worth of podcasts and YouTube videos that were posted by think tanks, media organizations, historical societies and universities. This material covered a wide variety of topics related to Israel and the Middle East, from Biblical and modern history, archaeology, environmental issues, strategic issues, economic issues, social issues, military issues, cultural issues, religious/theological issues, and all kinds of other stuff.

But, as I said in the beginning of this blog, I recently experienced something which made me remember old Dr. B's advice, and it's left me thinking he might have been just slightly ahead of his time.

It happened like this.

My wife and I are contemplating moving out of our apartment in a few months, so I decided to try and get ahead of the issue and start sorting through stuff now and getting rid of things I don't need. I have been astounded at how much junk I've found that I should have thrown out a long time ago, including clothes, toys, puzzles, games and other stuff my children outgrew years ago.

But I've also been going through my own stuff, including my precious books, and I realized that I had dozens of volumes that were no longer relevant to my life. Some of them were "obsolete" because they were essentially commentary on things which had been "current events" when they'd been written but were now "ancient history". For instance, I had three books that talked about the threat to Israel from the Assad regime in Syria, which no longer exists.

Other books weren't useful to me anymore, although they might have been useful to someone, so, I did what any self-respecting bookworm will do: I tried to find a library to donate these books to. I started with the library at my eldest son's high school, which is part of a network of schools that is closely connected to the Hebrew University. I figured they'd for sure want all this stuff, but they didn't, which wasn't the worst part.

The worst part was the reason they gave me for not wanting them.

One of the people who worked at the library told me, in fact, that up until a few years ago, the University probably would have happily taken these books, but because of AI, hardly anyone even needs books anymore, even at a university. AI can do all the research needed to write an up-to-the-minute expert report on any topic you might ask it to write, and the computer can give it to you in the form of a movie or podcast if you want it to. Sitting down to read a physical book, printed on paper, that an ordinary human "expert" spent months or even years researching and compiling, is rapidly becoming a thing of the past that no one does anymore.

I made a few more attempts to give my books to a good home but no one wanted them, so eventually I just left the two boxes at one of those places where old-fashioned people like me take and leave old-fashioned paper books.

As I walked away, trying not to think about all the money and time I had invested in all the books I was leaving behind, I had the horrible feeling that I was, in fact, an obsolete human being. Dr. B had warned me 30 years ago that my college degree was already obsolete even back then, but he'd tried to cheer me up by telling me that if I continued my education by reading and staying current on topics related to my profession, I'd continue to be relevant, and more to the point, employable.

Now, I was starting to wonder if even that is still true.

When I got home, I opened Chat GPT and asked it to write me an analytical synopsis of current events in the Middle East over the last 24 hours, taking into account historical trends, the policies of governments, corporations, etc, traditional precedents, current military deployments and forces, and so on. The result of that query left me deeply depressed. It was fantastic, brilliant even, at least as good as anything I could have written myself, and probably better, and I wasn't even using the most recent iteration of AI that's available.

The experience left me wondering what anyone needed me for anymore. My usual fee for an hour of freelance work is more than the cost of an AI subscription for an entire month. I justify charging that fee by telling my clients that I have so much experience and have invested all that time and effort to amass all that "expertise" which allows me to produce materials that will be useful to them.

I'm deeply grateful that I still have a few clients, but how long will that last, and what will I do if and when they figure out that they're being suckers to pay me so much for something that they can get from AI for a tiny fraction of the price?

With these cheerful thoughts buzzing through my mind, I listlessly opened up Facebook and started scrolling, and one of the first things I saw was a meme with Colossians 3:23-24; "And whatever you do, do it heartily, as to the Lord and not to men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance; for you serve the Lord Christ."

It came to me in a flash as I read these words from the Bible that the only thing that makes me special, the only thing that EVER made me special, was the God thinks I'm special. That brought to mind another passage of Scripture, Luke 12:24; Consider the ravens, for they neither sow nor reap, which have neither storehouse nor barn; and God feeds them. How much more value are you than the birds?

With that, my mood lifted as I recalled how God has always taken care of me, my entire life, including many seasons when I felt forgotten and forsaken by literally everyone else. So, even if my professional skills and all the "expertise" I've worked so hard and spent so much money accumulating is obsolete, God will still find a way to take care of me, just as He always has.

This has been a long blog, but I know I'm not the only person feeling obsolete these days, so I hope it was a blessing to someone.

Some Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence by Aaron Hecht

(Authors note: This blog is in two parts for those who don't have a lot of time and/or patience. The first part is fairly short and deals specifically with the subject of practical ramifications of Artificial Intelligence, the second part gets into some related philosophical and ontological issues for those who have time, bandwidth, and appetite for that sort of thing.)

PART 1, Practical Ramifications of AI

Artificial intelligence is a relatively new technological development that is already having an enormous impact on the lives of nearly every human being walking this earth's surface, whether we like it or not, whether we understand it or not (almost no one does), and even whether we're aware of it or not.

Many people are confused, worried and even afraid of what is happening, and some are also angry about how all of these massive changes are happening (and accelerating) without ordinary people having any input into the process or control over it. Some people, like Judah Gabriel Himango (who kindly allows me to post blogs to this site,) are really excited about all the wonderful and amazing things AI will be used for that will make our lives so much better. But even Judah acknowledge that there's also some potential for AI to be misused and abused.

So, with that in mind, what are some of the potential downsides of AI?

At the extreme end is the scenario presented to us in the Terminator movies, where an AI supercomputer becomes self-aware, decides that humans are an obsolete waste of time and resources and decides to wipe us out, using the control it has over the weapons we built to protect ourselves to destroy us instead.

This scenario is not entirely implausible, but I don't think it's very likely, and even to the degree that it is possible, it is far from being the only thing we need to worry about.

The very existence of this technology means that a lot of things are going to change and although change has happened for thousands of years, for most of human history, it came at a fairly slow pace, so people had all the time they needed to adapt. A "lifetime" of change usually took an actual human lifetime, sometimes more than one. Now, a "lifetime" worth of change can happen in just a few years. For instance, I'm not quite 50 years old, but the circumstances that defined my childhood are VASTLY different from the circumstances that my own children are dealing with, for better and for worse.

On a related note, my sister-in-law is a teacher in the Israeli school system, and she recently attended a meeting with many other teachers in which they were told very straightforwardly that big changes are going to have to be made in the educational process because the curriculum that currently exists is completely inadequate to prepare students for the jobs that they will be trying to get when they finish school in a few years. Students who graduated from school in the last few years at the top of their class, with good grades and all kinds of honors and achievements, are unable to find work because none of the companies they're applying to need workers who have their skills and abilities. This is already a problem, and it's getting worse by the month.

For that matter, we've already seen large numbers of people losing their jobs because AI can do what they used to do faster, better, and above all, cheaper. Big companies are willing to spend lots of money for AI software that will allow them to stop paying salaries (often the largest expense a business has) because they think that will increase their profitability. The problem with that, obviously, is that their workers are also their consumers. If enough consumers don't have money to buy products and services being produced by these big companies anymore, they can save all the money they want on not paying salaries, but they still won't be profitable because they're not going to be bringing in any income.

The economy is a system of systems, with many moving parts, all interacting with each other in different ways. If you remove one of the major components of any system (in this case, consumers being removed from the economy) that system will start to break down, and eventually it will just completely stop functioning. It might be replaced by something else sooner or later, but it will still be a massive shock to everyone who was part of the system to begin with.

This is also important to understand for those of you who think that you'll be able to keep your job by learning how to make AI work for you. AI is VERY good at learning and evolving, and whatever you think you can do now that AI can't, it will probably be able to do it just fine before too much more time has passed. 

But even if you DO manage to keep your job for awhile longer, if most of your neighbors DON'T keep their jobs, it's still going to cause all kinds of problems for you. Once again, the economy is a system of systems, with many moving parts. If some parts keep working the way they always did, that's all fine and good, but if other parts start to break down and stop working, it'll still cause problems even for the parts that still work.

To sum up part 1 of this blog, there is an observable historical pattern that there are always winners and losers any time civilization goes through a big change, whether it's brought on by changing weather patterns, some kind of political and/or cultural revolution, a big war and/or pandemic, or a technological breakthrough of some kind. Very few people know much about the losers of past seasons of change and VERY few people ever consider the possibility that they'll be one of the losers in whatever season of change they're currently in.

This is where the attitude comes from that can be summed up by the phrase "the world has always been falling apart, but we're still here".

Yeah, the collective human race is "still here" but literally billions of people who came before us, who were losers in the epochs they lived through, are not "still here," and even the memory of them has been largely erased. But what we do know about them is that they had a really bad experience and then they died.

My own personal opinion is that the season of change we're in right now, which is defined by changing weather patterns, political and cultural revolutions, and all the other things I mentioned before but above all by the technological revolution powered by AI, is going to produce far more losers than winners. I don't think it's wise for anyone to assume that they'll be one of the winners who are "still here" when it's over.

As a footnote, there's another possibility that I can see being very likely, and that is that the AI revolution will be held up for awhile by a factor that everyone seems to be forgetting about. AI data centers need an enormous amount of electricity to function, and the physical infrastructure that produces and distributes electricity in those parts of the world where AI data centers are being built is already in very poor shape. So the development of AI, and all the changes that AI is bringing to our lives, might be slowed down by this. 

But it's still coming, and that's a fact we all have to deal with as best we can.

Part 2, Philosophical and Ontological Ramifications of AI

Everyone knows that gunpowder was invented in China. But "China" is a big place, and it's been around for a long time, and many things happened there before careful, written historical records were being kept, so there's some dispute among historians about exactly where, when, and how it happened.

There are also lots of folk stories, legends, fairy tales, etc., about it because, as the saying goes, success has a thousand fathers.

One of my favorite legends about how gunpowder was invented goes a little bit something like this.

In China, many years ago, there was a village on the side of a mountain, and in this village, most of the men worked all day in a silver mine so they could get silver to trade for food with the villages down in the plains, which had farms.

One day, a baby girl was born in this village. She already had an older brother, and her father and his younger brother both worked in the silver mine. Every morning, they would go to the mine together and come home together in the evening to eat supper with the family. It was a happy life, but one day, the younger brother came home from the mine by himself with a very sad look on his face, and he told the family that his brother had died that day in an accident at the mine.

This was very sad, but it was something that happened sometimes, so a few years passed, and then the little girl's older brother was ready to go to work in the mine. Every day, he went to work with his uncle and in the evening, they came home and had supper with the family. But one day, he came home alone with a sad expression on his face and told his mother and sister that his uncle had died that day in an accident in the mine. Once again, it was sad, but time passed and one day the little girl was not so little anymore, and she got married. 

Her husband was a boy who had grown up with her in the village. They had known each other since they were children and she was very happy to be his wife. Every day, he went to work in the mine with her older brother and then came home in the evening to have supper with the family. But one day, her husband came home from work with a sad look on his face and told her that her brother had died that day in an accident in the mine. This was very sad for her, but soon she had good news to cheer her up because she gave birth to a beautiful little boy. He was the joy of her life and his father also loved him very much.

A few more years passed and every day her husband went to work in the mine with the other men of the village, but one day, the other men of the village came to her home at the end of the workday without her husband, and they had to tell her that he had died that day in an accident in the mine.

She sat down and cried and cried and cried, thinking about how bitterly unfair it was that her father, her uncle, her older brother, and now her husband had all lost their lives in accidents at this mine. Then she looked down at her son, playing in the sand outside their home and she realized that in just a few more years, he too would be old enough to go to work in the mine, and she would have to sit at home alone all day wondering if he would come home to her in the evening, or whether he would also die in an accident at the mine.

So, the next morning, she left her son with a neighbor and went to the mine with the men, which was a very unusual, almost unheard of, thing for a woman to do. When she got there, she asked to speak to the foreman, a man who had known her brother and her husband, and he reluctantly agreed to talk to her.

She asked him how and why so many men died in the mine, and he explained that it was very difficult work to dig for hours underground. The men got tired, and they started to get careless, and that's when accidents happened. He said that he and other foremen before him had tried many things to try and avoid accidents, but sooner or later, there would be another accident, and another, and another. He said it was something he wished he could do something about, but everything he could think of had already been tried.

So she went home and thought about what the foreman had told her, and she decided that she needed to find a way to make digging easier for the men so they wouldn't get tired and then they wouldn't get careless and start making mistakes that would lead to accidents.

So she went looking for answers to this problem, and she spent many days traveling to other villages to ask questions of people who knew different things about many subjects. After a few years, she began experimenting with different elements, and after many trials and much error, she thought she'd found a solution. So, on the first day that her son was old enough to go to work in the mine, she gave him a little jar filled with black powder and told him to give it to the foreman along with a little scroll on which she had written some instructions about how to use it, and also how to make more of the little black powder.

As she watched her son walking away towards his first day of work at the mine, carrying her little jar of black powder and the scroll with the instructions about how to use it, the little girl, who was actually an old woman by now, said to herself "I have saved my sons life, and I have also saved the lives of many more young men."

Now, obviously, this story isn't true, but it points us to a very important truth. Almost every technological development, invention, innovation, new process, etc. that has ever been dreamed up and built by anyone, was developed in order to solve some kind of problem. But MANY of these developments ended up being used for purposes that were not anticipated (or even imagined) by the people who did all the research and development to bring these things to the world.

My personal favorite example of this (which IS a true story) is the airplane, which, as everyone knows, was invented by Orville and Wilbur Wright and first flew at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903. The Wright brothers were motivated to build machines that could allow humans to fly for a few different reasons, but the practical outcomes they envisioned for their invention were fairly limited. Orville Wright told one of his friends in 1902 that he thought it would be really amazing to have a way to deliver mail faster, and they also believed it might be used to bring medicine to remote communities in time to save the lives of people who would otherwise die if they had to wait for the medicine to be brought by someone in a wagon pulled by horses or other pack animals.

Certainly, those uses WERE made of machines that were based on the technology that Orville and Wilbur Wright developed. But there were many other uses made of such machines, and Orville Wright, who died in January of 1948, got to see how machines based on his invention were used to horrific effect in two world wars, including the massive destruction of entire cities in Europe and the Far East by carpet bombing raids which culminated in the nuclear bomb strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by B-29 bombers at end of WWII.

Now there's one more, much less dramatic but no less demonstrative, example I can cite of this phenomenon.

Bruce Springsteen, sometimes called the poet laureate of America's brutalized working class, wrote a song many years ago called "Born in the USA." He wrote this song as a protest against the mindless Jingoism which he believed (and I agree with him) had been exploited by America's societal elites to manipulate ordinary people into doing a lot of things that were not in their actual best interests.

But as the years have gone by, the song actually became the ANTHEM of mindless jingoism, often played at political rallies and other events that had the exact effect on the crowds that Springsteen was specifically trying to criticize with the song, and he has expressed great frustration at this, but there's nothing he can do about it.

The point here is that once an engineer presents their invention to the world, or an artist presents their song, or an author presents their book, or as soon as anyone releases whatever they've created into the world, they lose control over what happens with it. In my own experience, I've had total strangers come up to me at events where I was wearing a name tag and tell me that they read a blog I wrote and it changed their life, which is great. But most of the time, what they took away from the blog they read was a million miles away from what I was trying to say in that blog. It's a fact of life that I've made my peace with, but I never forget it when I'm writing and posting these blogs.

When it comes to AI, it's such a powerful tool. The only thing that can even be remotely compared to it is the internet, which was designed to simply be a reliable way for the US military to communicate globally, but it turned out to be something that was used by everyone, making some things better and many other things much worse, and also bringing all kinds of new good and bad things that no one ever even imagined would happen.

Think about the unintended consequences of the internet, how much it's changed all of our lives just in a few decades. AI is going to change much more, and the changes are going to happen much faster. Most people won't be able to keep up. The system of systems that we call the global economy, and beyond that, human civilization itself, probably won't be able to keep up.

Something is going to have to give, and it's likely going to happen before the end of this decade, so my advice to anyone who is reading this blog is to take care of any unfinished business you might have with God, your family, and your current circumstances as soon as you can.

That's what I've got for you this week. I hope it blessed someone.

Some Thoughts on the Little Foxes, by Aaron Hecht

You don't hear too many sermons preached on the Song of Solomon, do you? Well, there are some really good reasons for that, actually, starting with the fact that this book in the Bible covers material that's more appropriate for private counseling sessions (especially pre-marital counseling) than for general interest. However, there's one passage that I heard a message on many years ago, and it came to my mind about a month ago when we were preparing to launch into a new year, and I thought about making some of those infamous "New Year's Resolutions."

The title of that sermon I heard many years ago was "Make war on the little foxes" and it was based on Song of Solomon 2:15; Catch us the foxes, The little foxes that spoil the vines, For our vines have tender grapes.

According to the interpretation of this message I heard many years ago (which I agreed with then and still do) the "little foxes" Solomon is referring to in this passage are the little, day to day habits that we all have which don't really create any serious problems of and by themselves, but when we do these "little" things on a regular or maybe even daily basis, over time, the impact they have accumulates and end up causing us big problems.

So, as the new year 2026 approached, I thought about what "little foxes" I had in my life that I could eliminate and, by eliminating them, slowly but surely eliminate the damage they were causing to my life.

I started with some low-hanging fruit, the bag of potato chips I used to buy for myself every time I went to the grocery store. This stupid little bag of chips "only" cost me six shekels and they "only" added about 180 calories to my daily intake. I "only" bought and ate them a few times a week, sometimes less, so it wasn't really such a big deal right?

Well, in the month of January, I didn't buy that little bag of potato chips when I went to the store. Instead, I made a hashmark in a little notebook every time I went to the store and DIDN'T buy a bag of chips. At the end of January, I was shocked to see that there were 19 hashmarks in that notebook. That meant I'd not spent  114 shekels on this "little fox" and I'd also not taken in 3,240 calories I didn't need, which is an entire day and a half worth of recommended caloric intake.

What's amazing is that occasionally, as I was eating those chips, I'd stop and think about how I really wasn't even enjoying them much, but I just had this habit of buying and eating them. Now, I have stopped, and I don't miss them at all.

There were a handful of other "little foxes" that I had less success eliminating. I still wasted too much time watching stupid videos on YouTube, and I bought a few things I probably didn't need, etc. But I reduced their presence in my life, and I have hope that in February, I will reduce them even more and maybe even eliminate them. In any case, my own personal "war on the Little Foxes" will definitely continue, and I have great hopes that by the end of the year, my bank account, my physical health, my daily schedule and many other things will be in better shape then they were on January 1st.

What are some "little foxes" that you can eliminate from your life? Let me know in the comments section, or if you don't want to, just think about it for yourself and determine to make war on them. You don't need to wait for a new year to start, you can do it right now.