Who Mourns the Overhead Projector?

I've been through a period lately where my sleep has been greatly disturbed, waking up in the middle of the night and then unable to fall asleep again for a couple hours, and then falling asleep again but slightly oversleeping my usual time and feeling groggy when it is time to get out of bed. A strange pattern.

A couple days ago I asked myself if maybe I like this pattern, which is why it persisting. I get to wake up, go look at the clock and realize again how early it is, and this lets me have the peaceful hours of the middle of the night to do nothing else but let my mind wander into thoughts that I might not have during the daytime hours.

Somehow that realization now lets me sleep mostly through the time, waking only briefly. Last night, in any case, I was awake and letting my mind wander for a short time. During that time I thought about AI and how it's going to disrupt everything, whether we like it or not. I thought about my small attempts to stay ahead of the curve, as if it is possible to do so.

I thought specirically about my physics project and how useful a tool it will be.  Will I feel stupid with the books I just bought? Will they sit on my shelf reminding me of another fruitless attempt to study a subject, the understanding of which has eluded me? The key is to be pesky and work at it everyday, I thought, which is eminently doable if I have the will. 

Then I thought about how all of this could disrupt classroom teachers. Are professors outdated? If so what does that mean? I don't think any of us knows what will happen as a consequence of it, but it is all but guaranteed that in a few years we will know. Students now in middle school will have a completely different experience than stuents at the moment, and no one knows what that will be.

Knowing this, I began to anticipate that many things we assume are unchangeable about our current experience will in fact change and disappear. Knowing myself, I will come to mourn the loss of the old ways and feel even more out-of-place in the world. I don't know the details, but this is all but guaranteed to happen as well.

This is only academia, of course, which is one aspect of life. But I still haven't gotten over the disappearance of the old overhead projectors, which disappeared completely over the last twenty years. The overhead was the cornerstone of science research because it made all lectures and talks interactive. One wrote directly on the slides to elaborate points, whether in a small classroom or in a giant lecture hall. Overhead slides were how people did their collaborative work.

I once pitied the folks in corporate America using Powerpoint. What a horrible way to present information, by fixed slides composed with a computer program. I thought such a thing would ever invade the dynamic, interactive world of physics research.

I was wrong. During my absence from the field, fixed Powerpoint slides replaced overhead slides for talks. The overhead projectors disappeared from classrooms. If you want to give a talk that way, you still can, but you have to bring your own projector now.

But people don't even want that. They want talks that can be broadcast on the Internet, or shared later as a video on Youtube. Overhead slides don't cut it. You probably couldn't even see what the lecturer writes on it. This trend was greatly accelerated by the pandemic. At this point, overhead slides have joined typewriter ribbons and carbon copies as museum artifacts.  If I were running a museum for science, I would have a whole room dedicated to the majesty and power of overhead projectors.

And don't get me started on drafting equipment. The end of drafting probably killed physics before I even got into the field. People used to care about their diagrams in a way that is now handled automatically by computer programs. I realized this while doing my dissertation in 1997. I never took drafting. It was still available when I was in high school, but it seemed like an outdated skill, and it was. But what replaced it was not equivalent in its expressive power. It made it "too easy" to make diagrams, like the way word processors made it "too easy" to revise one's prose, and thus removed an essential psychological element of writing that arose from the permanence of the letters being printed on the paper. Yet at the same time it made it impossible to make certain types of diagrams with ease. I would look at old classic journal articles from the 1960s and realize that to duplicate certain diagrams on a computer would take far more work than it did by hand.  Sure you could still do it the old way---sending in your hard copies of diagrams with your journal submissions, and they would typeset them dutifully in print, but who was still going to do it that way, especially among the young? So the late 1990s, I knew was a pale imitator of the great physics-artists of the past and strove to at least honor the style of the great papers of the past that expressed so much in only a few pages in a journal.

What will AI now remove from our toolboxes, that we will not mourn, and that the young people will not even notice as it passes into history? What will never get to experience, that has been assumed as a cornerstone of our experience at the moment?