The Joy of Rediscovery

I love all tools. Some tools create, while others unearth the forgotten past. I’m especially attracted to tools that help me explore old content. There is huge pleasure in exploring murky library stacks and pulling out a book that’s sat unnoticed for years.

It’s not just books. All old media — all old knowledge — is ripe for exploration. Stumbling upon a 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica in a used-book store, watching a 1920s film on YouTube, or discovering a 1949 EDSAC programming manual — each gives me that thrill.

I’m a programmer, always invigorated by new tools. My first encounter with ChatGPT last year was one of those thrilling moments. In this series of essays, I’ll explore the power of ChatGPT, best practices, and pitfalls.

First, allow me a brief detour to reminisce. Over the years, our tech industry has had many incredible shifts. Only a handful of them gave me a visceral “this will change my world” moment. Let’s look at some of those earlier moments before we dive into ChatGPT.

Printing: first you crawl…

I interned at NYU’s Courant Institute during my senior year of high school. One of the job’s perks was the nearby student computing facility, a large room of terminals connected to a timesharing system. Before starting each day’s work, I would indulge my lust for documentation by starting a print session on a clunky DECwriter. I’d return at the end of the day to pick up the dozens of pages that had managed to print (at 30 characters per second!) during those hours.

A year later, in 1980, I started at MIT and landed a job programming on a Xerox Alto. During my interview, the amazing new machine entranced me, and I eagerly asked to learn more. Professor Clark, my boss, agreed, pressed a few buttons, and led me to the elevator. We stepped through the 9th-floor machine room doors, and there it was: a real book, an inch-thick pile of published pages that had magically appeared during our brief ride. It was sitting on an output bin of the Xerox Dover, a giant cutting-edge printer.

This was my first sight of a laser printer. Its speed and quality blew my mind.

Browsing: the dawn of the Web

A few years later, long after I had left MIT and moved to Israel, I fished the Internet using the cutting-edge tools of the time: FTP, Archie, and Gopher.

One day, a friend in Boston showed me the latest toy, the Mosaic Web Browser. There wasn’t much content yet, just a few hundred web pages scattered worldwide. But the graphic interface was stunning. It was immediately obvious that the Web would be a game-changer for access to media and information.

Wandering: a world without limits

I’ve had GPSs since the early 1990s. Back then, these gadgets plugged into my notebook computer while I was driving. Despite needing preloaded maps and an awkward cable, they were amazing. Vacations and business trips through the ’90s and ’00s would have been much harder without a GPS. But none of them could be carried on a casual walk.

Then, in 2007, I arrived early for a committee meeting in a small Swedish town. I spent the first evening strolling quaint winding streets. This had always been a cautious pleasure of each trip — I love to explore but never wanted to be too lost in a foreign location.

But this time, I had a GPS built into my handheld Symbian phone. I was invincible. I could wander anywhere with no fear of losing my hotel. The feeling of liberation was incredible.

Enter ChatGPT

I’ve had many “first encounters” with new tools and technologies: my first emails in 1977, the mouse-driven Xero Alto, and ever-increasing computing power, to name just a few.

But very few had a sudden dramatic impact on me, where technology opened a new connection, flooded new content to me, and made old activities dramatically easier. My initial session with ChatGPT was the first such moment I’ve had in a long time, maybe even since my first encounters with search engines.

Like everyone else, I’d become an expert at Google searches and viscerally knew exactly how to search. My first session with ChatGPT proved that these skills are about to become obsolete, no less than keyword-driven librarian search tools had two decades earlier.

ChatGPT will not remain unrivaled for long. Just like Lycos and AltaVista were replaced by Google, ChatGPT will soon be surpassed. But it already offers a new way to think about search and knowledge acquisition. It’s already changed my daily routines.

In this series of articles, we’ll take a deep dive into ChatGPT as I show you why I find its powers so compelling and explore its strengths and weaknesses.