Did you know that today we have access to a tool never before imagined by humankind in all of history? In less than a decade, we've been experiencing technological advances that have completely revolutionized our lives and the way we learn, among other things.
A few days ago, I was sharing with my daughters the experiences I'd had since I was little. I remember that an aunt of almost the same age and I would entertain ourselves using my grandmother's radio recorder. What did we do? We simply recorded ourselves having a conversation about any old nonsense and then played it back at a higher speed. That was enough to entertain us for hours on end, laughing nonstop. I remember, and it still cracks me up, but my daughters, the oldest of whom is 14, can't understand a single thing I'm talking about. And that's when I started explaining to her that to record any type of audio, we need a device and a cassette that magnetically records the audio being played, or whatever is being played on the radio, or whatever can be captured through the microphone, whether built-in or external. I compared the cassette in a radio recorder to what we know today as a flash drive (which is rarely used these days). I managed to find a cassette and show it to her, explaining how it works, but it's still very rudimentary for them to understand and discover what took me many years to discover.
Today we can perform that same task with almost any device we have at home, and making a recording is practically within the reach of anyone on planet Earth. It can also be modified, edited, and played back as many times as one decides, making it instantly available to everyone, and anyone anywhere in the world can listen to an audio recording we make right now. This is very simple, and for those who haven't experienced some of the technology my daughters call "old-fashioned," they can't appreciate how easy and accessible the technological tools we have today are.
A few days ago we were also watching a documentary on YouTube, and because of the browser we were using, ads were playing in the middle of the documentary. I interrupted and said, "It seems like when we watched television, we used to get ads every so often." Again, one of my daughters asked me, "What's that, Dad?" So I stopped to explain what television was, talking about over-the-air television programs, those channels we had to tune in with an antenna and wait for the exact time our favorite show or movie would start. But the torture of watching movies on television was the endless commercials. The better the movie, the more commercials it had.
This whole reflection came to me as I've been using artificial intelligence more frequently lately, in my case GPT Chat, Deepseek, and others that are extremely useful to me. And something I find very interesting, aside from everything these new technologies can do, is that I can give GPT a book (a PDF) and then ask it to act as the author and explain some concept or technique presented in the book. GPT assumes the role we assign it and executes the task. It can create a summary of a book, it can capture the main ideas, it can do anything we tell it to do. In this case, I needed to reinforce and review a tracking technique taught in a book by Ryan Serhant, so I published the book in PDF on GPT Chat. There, I asked him for many things based on that and other books. GPT gave me a step-by-step guide on what I needed to think and say to achieve the goals I had set for myself.
So, once again, I'm grateful for the times we're living in. Today, we have tools we never thought we'd have, tools and technologies that, for people like me, come from a time when all of this wasn't even seen in science fiction movies. Today, it's a reality that any of us has access to. Are you taking advantage of it?
