DECEMBER 3, 2025 – (Cont.) As we left behind, Byron’s office and AI-driven computer screens, I pondered the contrast between the fast-moving information of his workday and my current broad leisurely survey of Chinese history—by the increasingly old-fashioned method of reading a book. That method is flawed, I recognized: it assumes that I’m not sleep-reading through the tome, and it requires more than short-term retention of a majority of the information, analyses, and insights imparted. Otherwise, what’s the point of the undertaking?
Consideration of this flawed method of learning about a largely ancient subject matter made me feel left behind even more than I’d been after the passing exposure to AI on Byon’s computer screens. Are we entering a post-information age, I wondered, in which everything we come to know will be via some AI-generated amalgam of algorithms injected into our brains on demand but never to be saved onto our mental “hard drives”? Will AI-driven evolution render long-term memory obsolete? Will a sinister element develop whereby “open access” knowledge is closed to the “have-nots”—people who are deemed politically undesirable by the powers that control Big Data? Or to increase the power and wealth of those same powers, will access to knowledge be monopolized by market control of “knowledge chips” hard-wired into the brain—for a fee, of course, that only the economically advantaged can afford, leading to a further chasm between the rich and the poor? Would “my kind,” who love to sit down with an old-fashioned book and absorb what we can . . . be left behind with other non-true-believers in AI?
Of course, my own work-for-hire and regular searches for information rely on AI, as well, just as many other aspects of my daily life depend on AI. These dependencies will expand exponentially for me, for Byron, for all of us. But many of us won’t ride the leading edge of AI, and consequently, we won’t be positioned to understand its implications, leverage its possibilities, or divert its sinister outcomes. One way or another, we’ll be left behind.
On our drive to the airport for the trip home to Minnesota, I wondered further about how AI will affect my profession generally and my practice in particular. I worried that AI’s growing influence would lead to increased anxiety, followed by intimidation, and ending in my being . . . left behind.
I felt myself getting older, as I reflected on how my own parents had tried to adapt to the emerging technologies of their “golden years”—smart phones and laptops. I remember how my dad seemed to age in the very course of trying to retrieve what he thought was a lost document on his laptop. I found it for him easily enough, but the experience had undermined his self-confidence and replaced it with hesitancy. Though he didn’t express it as a feeling of being left behind, I could tell that’s how he felt. And now I was experiencing the very same hesitancy—and fear of being left behind.
I tried to forget about it once we’d boarded the plane and I resumed reading my book on China. Once aloft and past the storm system that blanketed much of the Northeast, I looked down on Lake Huron as our flight path approached the eastern shoreline of Michigan. What a magnificent sight, I thought, as is so much of our planetary home. The people who will be left behind, I thought, will be those who’ve become so detached from the wonders of our world, they’d rather pull down the shade of their airplane window seat and watch a bad movie.
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
