I continue to experiment with AI apps, and it has become kind of concerning to me. From what I can deduce, the majority of the things in my life that I can and have done to any degree of proficiency appear to be well within the capabilities of the weakest of the AI apps available. Seems kind of sad, but at least when my careers are over, I won’t have to hear about how this “young whipper snapper” is so good at what I used to do. Carry on.
If you are into retirement planning, AI is off the charts good at running scenarios for you. It also learns about you as time goes on, which is scary but makes the scenarios far more personalized than the old school Google searches of our youth. That was so yesterday.
Memorial Day arrives each year with familiar signs of summer — backyard grills, crowded lakes, and long weekends on the road. Yet beneath the celebration rests something far more important: remembrance.
The holiday was born from the grief that followed the Civil War when families gathered to decorate the graves of fallen soldiers. Over time, Memorial Day became a national moment to honor all Americans who died in military service. It is not simply a day off work. It is a day purchased at a cost most of us will never fully understand.
Across generations, young men and women left farms, factories, classrooms, and hometowns to answer a call larger than themselves. Many never returned. They died in muddy trenches, distant deserts, frozen mountains, and dangerous seas so future Americans could live in freedom and relative peace.
In today’s fast-moving world, it is easy to let Memorial Day become another date on the calendar. But perhaps the best way to honor the fallen is not through grand speeches, but through quiet gratitude. Visit a cemetery. Attend a local parade. Fly the flag. Teach children why the holiday exists.
Freedom is often discussed casually in America because so many sacrifices were made to preserve it. Memorial Day reminds us that liberty has never been free.
As the nation pauses this year, may we enjoy the blessings of family and community while remembering those who gave everything for both.
ChatGPT wrote that Memorial Day stanza for me in approximately two seconds. It takes me double that amount of time to find the right keys on the keyboard to start a paragraph. If you think AI is not changing your world, you better rethink that.
I think it will eventually stock your refrigerator and our store shelves, direct your car to a gas station, make your social media posts, and do a lot of your jobs. It will order inventory, conduct inventories, hire, fire and manage large workforces 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. It will return your texts, check your temperature, and schedule your doctor appointments and in many cases request the time off work to attend those same doctor appointments. It will plan your vacations, book your rooms, and tell you when to leave.
It is going to be insane for those of us that remember life before AI. There will eventually be no “work arounds” for those of us that want to be less connected.
I think back to this often. I saw a car company billboard advertisement in the early 1990’s that had a web site address for more information and I thought that was so stupid. Who was going to get on a computer to look up a car? Just a few years later, my foolish thoughts were awash in internet searches. AI is going to be like that but at warp speed. Alarming speed is my prediction.
(Guy Speckman can be reached via his AI assistants)
