It was July 1976.
I was 11 years old and had just finished 5th grade at Olympic View Elementary in Oak Harbor, WA. The nation had just celebrated our bicentennial — 200 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. And like most kids my age, I loved to listen to music.
Prior to 1976, I listened to my vinyl records on my record player (nobody called it a turntable). But about that time, I purchased my first cassette tape. It was Fly Like an Eagle by the Steve Miller Band. I knew at that point, vinyl was dead and cassettes were the new order.
(Little did I know that 50 years later I would be buying vinyl records again and wishing I had kept my old ones!)
That switch from vinyl to cassettes was just a foreshadowing of what was coming. By the early 1980s, cassettes were being replaced by compact discs. In 1999, Napster launched, MP3 downloads exploded, and the music industry was turned upside down. In 2003, iTunes brought legal digital downloads — individual songs for $0.99. A decade later, streaming became the dominant model and subscription replaced purchase entirely.
Today, we can listen to any song from any era on a device that would have looked like something out of a Dick Tracy comic strip.
In a world history full of industrial and cultural revolutions, that 50-year timeline may be the most compressed before AI.
It was only about three years ago that most of us even learned what ChatGPT was. It seemed remarkable then, but that version is already obsolete. Today, AI platforms are emerging constantly. What took the music distribution industry 50 years to evolve was likely compressed into less than a year with AI.
Imagine what AI will look like in three years. Or ten. Or fifty, when my grandchildren will be nearly my age. That may feel unsettling. But the opportunity it creates will exceed any revolution the world has previously experienced.
If there’s one thing we should have learned from the pandemic six years ago, it’s that human connection is vital. When we couldn’t engage with each other, we pivoted, finding new and creative ways not only to stay connected, but to expand our community to the world. And while we largely returned to what life looked like before, that expansion never fully contracted.
Now the worry is that AI will take jobs, replace people, and render us obsolete. Unlike 8-track tapes, that won’t happen — if we recognize that we now have a greater opportunity than ever to invest in what will never go out of style: human community.
As we become more entrenched globally in artificial intelligence, the need for human engagement — professionally and personally — only grows. What do I mean by community? I mean neighborhood picnics, service club meetings, business networking groups, and nonprofit charity events. Ballgames and golf rounds, mentoring kids and volunteering at soup kitchens. And yes, using technology to connect face-to-face with family, friends, and business clients all over the world.
AI helps us do that. Greater efficiency, used wisely, creates more time for each other.
Business has always been about relationships. That will never change. Meeting over coffee or lunch, getting to know people both professionally and personally — that has always led to business. Imagine what happens when we actually have more time to do it.
As I write this, I’ve been dealing with a lingering cough. As I often do, I turned to Claude for research, asking it to channel the world’s greatest doctor. I used that information and collaborated with my doctor’s office via text (not an option in 1976). After a few days without improvement, Claude suggested I talk to my pharmacist, noting that these professionals are often underutilized and deeply knowledgeable. I took that advice and talked to the human expert.
We are living through likely the greatest industrial and cultural revolution of our lifetimes. We can fear it and retreat to our cassette tapes, or we can blend and balance AI and HI — human interaction — to build community and improve our lives, our businesses, and our relationships.
AI is the new cassette tape — powerful, disruptive, and eventually replaced by something we can’t yet imagine. Human connection is the vinyl. It came back because nothing else could replace it.
Invest accordingly.
