I look about the world and even the industry that I grew up in and marvel at the changes that I have seen in my lifetime. One can look back to the Gutenberg Bible. It was the first book printed using individual letters that were collected to make words and the words to make sentences. It began a revolution in printing books and newspapers that moved across Europe and then to the colonies of North America.
Back in the 1960’s the Fort Frances Times still retained several cabinets with those tiny letters and large trays of wooden letters three and four inches in height. It was obsolete technology then but was still useful for making posters.
In the late 1890’s technology changed, and newspapers went from putting letters together for words individually to casting whole sentences in lead using either a Linotype, or Intertype machines that had magazines filled with hundreds of individual mats that dropped into a line that was then cast with lead and a whole line was printed. It was all completed by a linotype operator. That improved so that a punched tape was fed to the machine that could read the lines of holes on the tape and then automatically cast the line. Several people could be punching tape, and the machine could operate much longer without a break.
That changed again in the late 1960’s when photo paper collected the words on columns that could then be laid on ruled paper and glued. The paper replaced the lead. Presses changed and offset printing grew until all presses were offset. Eventually entire pages were produced electronically, then photographed. those images were burned by intense light onto metal aluminum plates. Today, those pages are placed on metal plates and put on the press. With each change, the number of people needed to produce the newspaper was reduced. Each change was revolutionary in our industry.
The difference is, people are still needed to collect the news, see-first hand wars, understand medical miracles as technology advances and then write or tell those stories for future generations to see, hear and learn from today. Those news gatherers now can reach out across thousands of locations to people and sources for news. But there are now risks. As I write this column, the software constantly wants to add ideas and different words to the story. Artificial intelligence can write stories about the news with minimal human input. Teachers are already seeing the impact of AI when students submit essays for grading. The social networks are susceptible to falsely written stories.
We’ve seen various revolutions through time – the industrial revolution using steam, the manufacturing revolution with its assembly lines, the computing revolution, the cyber physical revolution with computers making decisions and now we face the AI revolution. The change in our technologies and the advancement of revolutions are happening much faster than ever. What took centuries to advance now occurs in just a decade. We can only try to imagine what this new technology will bring to our lives.
