Alan Taylor: prediction

Transcript context

…Say you could wear glasses — and I think this will be possible in less than five years — and the glasses record everything you read and put it into a database that you can search just using your voice. So everything you’ve read in your entire life, you would have on file, searchable; you could organize it any way you want. I would think that would change things. I don’t know how, not being a historian. Absolutely. Given your description of it, it would change things radically. Now, I’m trying to resist being the old curmudgeon who says the way we did things in my day are the way things always should be. But I would say is, it does seem that AI and the various other technological revolutionary measures that we’re right on in the midst of right now, in terms of managing data and analyzing data, is going to render the individual human mind of less value in the overall process and is going to — it seems to me, is going to diminish the role, therefore, of individuality and diversity in analyzing data and telling stories about the past, which is what we do as historians. We tell stories that we think, and hopefully our readers agree, are meaningful for understanding the past in relationship to their current situation. All I can say is, it does seem like we’re in the midst of a very radical change. I like the system of analyzing data that I grew up figuring out, and I’ll be sad to see it go. How can an educated person best use YouTube to learn history without going too badly astray?…

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