By Tom Deegan
On the windy sand dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville Wright kept a biplane in the air for 12 seconds and covered 120 feet at the turn of the last Century. Years later, Charles Lindberg flew solo to Paris in 1927. To this day we are in awe of his accomplishment. By the way, Lindberg had a Maine connection. He had been courting Anne Morrow on the Island of North Haven in Penobscot Bay, where Lindberg was able to land on an air strip, still intact to this day. Still, it was years before the first commercial flight with a DC-3 from Santa Monica Airport on December 17 th , 1935, on the 32d anniversary of the Wright Brothers first powered flight.
Another first was the electricity on display at the Chicago Worlds Fair’s White City, in 1893, to celebrate Westinghouse and Alternating Current. Houdini was at the Fair along with Buffalo Bill Cody. In a personal aside, I should mention that my great grandmother had run off to be one of Buffalo Bill’s groupies, scandalizing her staid middleclass family back in Brooklin, New York. The wonders the Fair exhibited were the sewing machine, the iron, the dishwasher and the appearance of the lowly hotdog and hotdog bun. Still, rural electrification did not emerge until the Thirties when New Dealer, Franklin Roosevelt, insisted on spreading the innovation countrywide with his rural electrification program. In my lifetime, as a guide at the 1964-65 New York World’s I was in and out of the Bell Telephone exhibit on a daily basis where –believe it or not—you could talk on a phone to a friend across the room and watch her reaction on a small screen. The Apple iPhone made its debut in 2007, 42 years later.
Our railroad spur from Bangor to Old Town was one of the early railroad ventures in America, transporting lumber from above the rapids in the Penobscot river to schooners docked on the Bangor waterfront. Costly as it was–built before heavy equipment–the spur and made Bangor one of the richest towns in America before the Civil War. In this case the once revolutionary idea of heavy iron carriages on steel rails has paid for itself many times over . . . and is still running. Now we have Artificial Intelligence, the latest development that will change our lives. We are told AI will making life easier for many with the promise of performing routine chores and eventually even make decisions. Andrew Yang, a tech entrepreneur who ran for President in 2020 on a proposal of Basic Universal Income, is concerned about workers displaced by automation. Scoffed at by professional political handicappers Mr. Yang is enjoying a second life on cable talk shows. Maybe he had something after all.
One obvious use of Artificial Intelligence is spell check on the Microsoft WORD. This application underlines misspelled words and attempts to correct them. Bill Gates boasts of incorporating AI into his Microsoft portfolio and spell check would seem to be a candidate. According to the Oxford English Dictionary 170,000 words are in the English lexicon, made up of combinations of five vowels and 21 consonants. You would think that suggesting correct spelling by context would be a perfect fit for this app. Not so, unfortunately. I do a lot of writing and I’m the world’s worst speller. Spell check only corrects a fraction of the words I manage to mangle, even when the context is straight forward.
I believe in Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Elison and the other SiliconValley bros. They are the railroad barons of the Twenty-first Century, opening up new opportunities for all of us. But sadly, these demigods expect we poor mortals to buy into their vision on faith alone. They have made little attempt to educate the public. The guru’s toss around the acronym AI, particularly on the cable TV business channels, as if understanding is taken for granted.
As I write, Artificial Intelligence stock portfolios are breaking through the standard barriers of price/earnings ratios on Wall Street. More money is being placed at risk in the expectation that AI stocks will soar in value. During the Dutch Golden Age contract prices for tulip bulbs soared on their stock markets to six times the average annual salary, only to spectacularly collapse in the ‘tulip craze’ of February of 1637 . . . thus, providing a cautionary analogy for investors down through the ages.
About the Author: Tom Deegan, the author was a nurse traveler in the Southwest for 15 years and wrote Healthcare…a View from the Trenches about his experiences. Mr. Deegan grew up in a very political Irish family from Brooklyn and saw many of the political greats of the 1960s up close as he worked behind the scenes on Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 Presidential campaign setting up his campaign office in New York.