10/09/2026
Ok so i found this super article......about a dad talking to his son about AI......backs up my own comments on evolutionary progress we all forget took place because its been normalised like internet banking and online flights bookings.....both shutting down to careers for people who had to leave a job and find another careeer.
But here is a snippet....
This isn’t new, by the way. Every technological shift gets demonized before it gets normalized.
In the 1450s, the printing press was going to destabilize society. In the 1880s, Edison publicly electrocuted dogs, calves, and horses to convince people that Tesla and Westinghouse’s alternating current was too dangerous for homes. He even pushed for the electric chair to run on AC so people would associate it with death. AC eventually won. It’s how you’re powering the device you’re reading this on.
When sound came to film in 1927, musicians protested because it would kill orchestra jobs in movie theaters. They weren’t wrong — roughly 20,000 musicians lost their jobs. But sound on film created the entire modern entertainment industry. Composers, sound designers, audio engineers, film scorers, Foley artists, podcast producers, streaming platforms — many of the people reading this have a job because sound on film led to the adjacent possible of everything that followed.
In 1932, when Gage Brewer gave the first public performance of an electric guitar in Kansas, some people were afraid to attend because they thought he might get electrocuted on stage. The electric guitar went on to define the sound of the twentieth century.
oshua Heath Scott
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DO WE REALLY CARE ABOUT THE WATER?
How Demonizing AI Is Revealing Our Own Hypocrisy
Joshua Heath Scott
Jan 20, 2026
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62
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Yesterday, my fifteen-year-old son shared some big concerns he has about AI. He’d learned that it is going to drain the world’s water supply. He saw some reels and read some information about how data centers are consuming billions of gallons of water, and how by 2027, AI could be using more water than entire countries.
He was genuinely concerned. And I was genuinely proud of him for caring. But I also saw an opportunity to teach him something more valuable than any statistic: how to think critically about the statistics themselves.
I’ve spent almost three decades in the music industry, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that marketing is really just the art of convincing you of an idea. Sometimes that idea is a product. Sometimes it’s a mythology. And sometimes it’s an agenda dressed up as helpful journalism.
To all my guitar audience (most of you) — take the Tube Screamer. This iconic green overdrive pedal and its original production units’ “legendary” JRC4558D chip — the secret sauce that supposedly makes the old units sound magical. Guitarists have paid thousands of dollars for old Tube Screamers because of this mythology. There’s just one problem: it’s nonsense.
VINTAGE Ibanez TS-808 Tubescreamer 1981 — Pedal Empire
The JRC4558D was a cheap, readily available op-amp that Ibanez used because it was affordable. It wasn’t selected for its sonic properties. It was selected for its price and availability at a mass production scale. But the mythology persists because it serves certain people’s agendas. Sellers benefit from scarcity narratives. Buyers want to believe they’ve found something special. And so a mundane supply chain decision becomes a holy grail.
Or the Klon Centaur Professional Overdrive. Same story: ordinary germanium diodes became the stuff of legend. Why? Because mystery sells. Because people want to believe in magic. And because very few people bother to actually investigate whether the mythology is true.
JHS' Josh Scott is selling the first Klon Centaur for $500,000
This type of “selling” ran rampant in the boutique pedal boom of the 90s and early 2000s. True bypass became “best” because it’s all the DIY builders knew how to do. Germanium transistors sounded better because some of the biggest builders didn’t want to learn how to adjust circuitry to properly use silicon devices.
Information and marketing become one-sided when the people selling it have to protect their own survival biases.
This isn’t new, by the way. Every technological shift gets demonized before it gets normalized.
In the 1450s, the printing press was going to destabilize society. In the 1880s, Edison publicly electrocuted dogs, calves, and horses to convince people that Tesla and Westinghouse’s alternating current was too dangerous for homes. He even pushed for the electric chair to run on AC so people would associate it with death. AC eventually won. It’s how you’re powering the device you’re reading this on.
When sound came to film in 1927, musicians protested because it would kill orchestra jobs in movie theaters. They weren’t wrong — roughly 20,000 musicians lost their jobs. But sound on film created the entire modern entertainment industry. Composers, sound designers, audio engineers, film scorers, Foley artists, podcast producers, streaming platforms — many of the people reading this have a job because sound on film led to the adjacent possible of everything that followed.
In 1932, when Gage Brewer gave the first public performance of an electric guitar in Kansas, some people were afraid to attend because they thought he might get electrocuted on stage. The electric guitar went on to define the sound of the twentieth century.
Ro-Pat-In's First Electric Spanish – Vintage Guitar® magazine
Television was going to rot our brains. By the 1950s, critics were calling it the “boob tube” — a narcotic that would turn society into passive consumers incapable of independent thought. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr predicted in 1949 that “much of what is still wholesome in our lives will perish under the impact of this visual aid.” Sound familiar? To be fair — has reality TV been great for the collective intellect? Probably not. But we also got Cronkite, the moon landing, Seinfeld, and a shared cultural language that shaped generations and absolutely pushed us further in creativity, technology, and a healthier worldview.
When QuickBooks launched in 1992, accountants feared obsolescence. Instead, it created more accountants than ever — because suddenly small businesses could afford to care about their books, which meant they needed people to help them understand what the software was telling them.
In the 1990s, the internet was going to destroy human connection. And honestly? That one might have some teeth — we’re more connected and lonelier than ever. But here we are, you and me, connecting across distance, learning from strangers, accessing more knowledge than any library in history
YOU DON’T ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT THE WATER
How Demonizing AI Is Revealing Our Own Hypocrisy
