"Bicycle face and the Red flags". The test of wisdom is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

In my previous post, I discussed why is it worth reading Aristotle’s 10 virtues even after 2,300 years, and questioned whether technology and generative AI will impact humanity's original thinking.

In this post, let's explore whether our fear of new technology is warranted.

In history, every new technology was greeted by fear and panic that caused people to predict the end of the world.

In the 1860s, the invention of bicycles caused a moral panic. Bicycles were the first easy-to-use personal transportation thing that let people travel between towns. There was no need to own, train and feed horses.

There was a historical panic specifically around the time, young women, who for the first time were able to independently venture outside the confines of the town.

And so the magazines at the time ran all these stories on a medical phenomenon called bicycle face to scare women away.

The idea of bicycle face was the exertion caused by pedaling a bicycle would cause your face would grimace.

And then if you were on the bicycle for too long, your face would lock into place, you would be unattractive and therefore unable to get married.

Cars caused moral panic. In the early days of the automobile, you had to hire another guy, to walk 200 yards in front of the car with a red flag.

He had to wave the red flag, one could only drive as fast as he could walk because the red flag was to warn people, that the car was coming.

In Pennsylvania. They had the most Draconian version, which was, that they were very worried about the cars scaring the horses.

And so there was a law that said if you saw a horse coming, you need to stop the car, you have to disassemble the car and you had to hide the pieces of the car behind the nearest hay bale, wait for the horse to go by and then you could put your car back together.

Let’s not forget the teachers opposed calculators and spelling and grammar checks in the word processors.

So, is our fear of Generative AI and chat GPT much ado about nothing?

What do you think?

Credit: Thanks to Marc Andreessen for recommending Men, Machines and Modern Times by Elting Morison.

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