Last week, I received a call from someone looking for claims assistance. During the conversation, he proceeded to tell me that because I was of an older generation, I had little respect, and/or knowledge for modern social media and AI.
“Here we go”, I thought to myself.”How quickly history forgets.” I was probably programming computers when my caller hadn’t even been born yet. While Neil Armstrong was walking on the moon, I was writing BASIC code for a Commodore 64 computer and saving my programs on a cassette tape recorder. In fact, I wrote a BASIC program for a “Missle Command”-like game I played on the Commodore 64.
In fact, I am still writing HTML to get this program on Word Press to “justify” alignment. Knowing a little bit of HTML goes a long way. The school I was teaching in at the time used COBOL for their business computers as did most businesses at the time. While COBOL was a very good software for business purposes, it did have its drawbacks. Writing code for COBOL was a real pain. If there was an error in the program, COBOL required programmers to hunt through thousands of pages of code to locate the error AND all of the code after the error had to be rewritten.Yikes!
Of course, the US government used FORTRAN for what seemed like forever. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that some departments may still depend on that software.
Then again, there was the age of writing macro scripts for Excel spreadsheets. It seemed that everything had to have an Excel spreadsheet that ran automatically. I did that, and in reality was very good at making Excel spreadsheets “sing” so to speak. I do believe that Unum may still be using a program I wrote 25 years ago to compute SSDI overpayments.
I think it is somewhat true that older programmers do not give social media much respect. I admit I never found the value of saying anything in less than 167 characters in a tweet. I don’t have a need to share my every thought or action on social media and find that in my current profession social media is more dangerous to insureds than constructive.
While I find it hard to believe that we went to the moon on Commodore 64 technology, I am also skeptical of the AI generations who leaves it up to one person(s), entities to program a world view. I get that AI is able to “think”, but all that means is that it scopes the Internet looking for information, which it adds to its own data base. As far as I know, we have not yet developed a software that “thinks for itself” like the robots in the movie, I Robot, with Will Smith.
So, hats off to the old programmers who set the pace for the nerds of today. I wouldn’t throw us away quite yet!
