When asked what it is I do, my children never know what to say.
"It's something to do with social something, and he does a lot of computer stuff" is the best they can usually do.
I am, on paper, a technologist - but all of my work for the past 20 years has included social dynamics in one form or another: improving how teams work together, coaching businesses on the social aspects of problem-solving, predictive systems to do with human behavior, that sort of thing.
It's the latter that I care about, but the former that I'm known for. And it's there that another Uncle Scott confession lurks:
I have no interest in computers at all. Zero. None.
I never have. In my first round of undergrad, I was a psych major with journalism and sociology on the side. I only took my first computer class because my mom had gone back to school and we thought it would be fun to take a class together (the class was FORTRAN I, and it was actually my second; I'd had PL-1 at UK). My mom eventually dropped away from computer classes, but I now had a baby to feed, and journalism doesn't feed a family. So I ended up taking 65 hours of tech classes.
This pragmatism was by no means innate; I am NOT the plan-ahead, do-what's-prudent type at all. I am a dream-chaser, an unrealistic artist mind that indulges itself shamelessly and impractically, taking all manner of unwarranted risks. My mom is the opposite, all about the have-to and almost indifferent to the want-to. My ADD gene did not come from her.
But on this occasion she prevailed. She didn't deflect me from psychology - it was my next degree - but because of that detour into tech, my career has been a hybrid of the two ever since. And this opened the door to AI. And anthropology. And higher math. And the study of human consciousness.
If not for my mom and the dull computer, I'd have drifted into campus life and been a psych professor; instead, I became a polymath, a far more fulfilling life. I've done my share of teaching, but I've also designed and build smart parts for DARPA; stood on the decks of aircraft carriers, pondering electromagnetic launchers; designed intelligence systems that improve healthcare; learned undiscovered things about the widgets in human personality. It's been a ride.
(Why is he telling us this?)
I'm telling you this because I've written a great deal lately about our relationship to our machines, which is changing rapidly. AI is already far more deeply embedded in your life than you realize, and it will increase by two orders of magnitude over the next decade. Simply because my mom prodded me into the digital realm, I am now standing at the apex of human-machine, analyzing and commenting on how the relationship is redefining the world. I feel lucky to be here.
And I'm sharing with you my appreciation of the serendipity of it all, the unexpected twists and turns that have put me where I am. I have no shred of doubt that each of you has followed some variation of this course - you plotted a particular journey that appealed to you, and wound up somewhere else. It happens to it all. But aren't you better off, for the course you ended up taking?
"We plan; God laughs," goes the Yiddish proverb. It's the one utterance of the Almighty to which I'm receptive...
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