CTRL ALT AI: Introduction

When I was twelve years old, I went alone to visit my grandparents in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Unlike most 12-year-olds I knew at that time, I had a girlfriend, our pastor’s daughter in fact, and even though we went to the same school, our relationship subsisted on long, meandering telephone calls. Access to a telephone, therefore, seemed to be of existential importance to me at the time.

My grandparents were on a fixed income, but generous to a fault, so they offered me the use of a rotary telephone which had been installed in a hallway in the early 1950s and tried not to think about what I was about to do to their long distance bill. They bought the phone and had it professionally installed because their daughter, my mom, was born with a congenital heart defect, and they wanted to be able to use it to summon doctors and ambulances. So it had an important job, and they literally put it on a pedestal in the hallway. Technology amplifies intention. It multiplies its inputs.

The phone had a long cord so that you could pull it into the adjacent dining room and sit on a chair while speaking to the other party. I imagined my teenage mother stretching the cord out all the way into her bedroom for a semi-private conversation with a young man on the line. That phone is on a shelf in my office today, and it still works. But one time, it didn’t. So I opened it up. And what I saw inside changed my perspective.

The first thing I noticed was the mechanical bell. A subtle change in voltage on the line causes a mechanical hammer to violently and relentlessly strike a metal clanging bell inside the phone. It’s a wonderful, cacophonous, urgent noise that will not be ignored.

A speaker in the handset uses magnets and a thin metal disc to move air at the same frequency as the tiny electrical impulses that it receives, pushing air into your ear, vibrating at a thousand hertz. Another kind of transducer does the same thing in reverse. You move air with your lungs and vocal cords, and it uses that pressure and vibration to vibrate a pair of electromagnets, which sends a low voltage representation of your voice modulation into a wire. That’s all completely bonkers already, but then how does it dial?

The rotary dial is a spring-loaded mechanism. You pull it to the number seven and release it, and a tiny governor controls the speed as the spring whips it back. A rotating cam slams a metal contact open and shut, open and shut, seven times in less than a second. Each time the contact breaks, the current on the line dies. And each time, in the instant before the gap opens fully, the current arcs: the electricity leaping across the widening contact, not wanting to let go. Seven breaks. Seven tiny fires, so small you’d need a dark room and a magnifying glass to see them. Seven changes in voltage, seven mechanical switches somewhere start routing your signal through the noise. Seven.

So we were blissfully unaware that mechanized hammers and sparks and fire and magnets and electrons were quietly, violently, and obediently carrying our whispered words across the plains.

We’ve forgotten how much had to go right for that phone call to happen. I’m telling you about it because the same thing is happening right now with something else, and we’re about to stop noticing. AI is going to disappear into our subconscious. Technology always does. That phone worked because the people who built it understood every spark inside it. The AI in your office works because somebody understands it, and this book was written to invite you into an understanding of artificial intelligence that I hope will allow you to use it to do great acts of truth, kindness and beauty.

I heard a comedian on television once do a bit about how everything is amazing and no one is happy. His example was a guy on an airplane complaining about the slow wifi. His response was to remind the guy that he’s in a chair relaxing as he is hurtling through the sky at hundreds of miles an hour, and that his laptop is retrieving information, from space for him in real time. He argues that the guy should be saying “WOW! WOW! WOW!” as he looks around like a crazy person in hilarious faux wonder, shock, and awe.

I have a robot. Not the sort you’re picturing, but a few thousand lines of code running on a computer in my office about the size of a paperback novel. Every morning before I wake up, it reads the newspaper. Lots of newspapers, in fact. It decides what I’d find interesting based on what it knows about me, assembles a reading list, and sends it to me in a concise email, articles linked, with all the ads and paywalls removed. I built it in an evening. That would have been incomprehensible three years ago. Today it’s hardly impressive at all, but with some revisions, it has become adept at finding me precisely the articles I want to read, which means I read more, and I know things faster. At some point, that becomes an advantage.

For twenty years, the people who built software had access to a set of doors that the rest of us couldn’t open. You needed to know how to code. You needed to comprehend REST API documentation and javascript and python. Now the doors open automatically if you can simply describe what’s behind them and what you want to happen.

Ordinary people are about to make a lot of extraordinary software.

I’ve been building and selling technology for more than two decades. I co-founded an IT service provider and led it from three people in an office shared with a landscaping company until it was acquired by one of the best and largest MSPs in California. I also served as interim COO of an AI startup that detects concealed firearms using WiFi, and remain an active investor in companies trying to solve problems I care about. I build things with technology and watch them work. I build things with technology and watch them fail. But I compulsively open things up. I look inside. I figure it out. It’s probably the thing I do best. I am relentless.

In my first book, Ctrl Alt Survive, I wrote about two kinds of technologists. I called them Knight Rider technologists and Airwolf technologists. Knight Rider technologists use technology to help people. Airwolf technologists love the machine itself - blinking lights, explosions, power. Neither perspective is inherently wrong. But only one of them is really capable of caring about what will happen to someone outside themselves. AI is the most powerful force multiplier ever built. A force multiplier has an operator, and when the operator does not supply the judgment, the multiplication happens anyway. I would like you to consider which kind of technologist you will be.

In Walt Disney’s Fantasia, an anthropomorphic rodent borrows a hat and enchants a broom to carry water. It works. That’s the problem. The broom does exactly what the rodent asked, he just didn’t think through the consequences of his prompt. He wrote incomplete instructions for something tireless and literal, and by the time he noticed the flood, the brooms had continued beyond his ability to stop them.

The brooms are moving. They are carrying pails of water. They are doing exactly what they were asked. The workshop is just beginning to flood, and the sorcerer still hasn’t come back from lunch.