Just realized my dad was using AI tools before I was

I was on the phone with my dad last night, he's 72 and lives in a small town in Ohio. He started talking about a spreadsheet he built to track his garden watering schedule based on weather data he pulls from online. I made a joke about him being a data scientist and he got quiet for a second, then said 'I've been automating decisions with information my whole life, you kids just gave it a fancy name.' It hit me that what we call AI innovations now is really just an extension of what people have always done with pattern recognition and data. He uses a cheap sensor from Amazon that feeds into a Raspberry Pi he set up three years ago to decide when to water his tomato plants. I was sitting there with my fancy chatbot subscription feeling pretty silly. Has anyone else had an older relative casually explain they've been doing the same thing with simpler tools for decades?

2 comments

2 Comments

paul_lane8017d ago

Ngl, that's a cool story but a raspberry pi with sensors is still pretty modern tech, not really what people were doing "for decades.

raymartin17d ago

Man, that's a great point @paul_lane80. People act like this hobby stuff just popped up overnight, but it's been happening in weird ways for a long time. I remember my uncle had this whole setup in his garage in the 90s with a PC and a bunch of salvaged sensors from old appliances, just tracking temperature and humidity for no reason. It's funny how we keep reinventing the same thing but calling it new every decade or so.