AI Is My Parents’ DOS: What Happens When Age Meets Technological Evolution

By Kenneth Braswell, CEO, Fathers Incorporated

I remember when the computer screen was green. There was no mouse. No touchscreen. No app waiting for you to tap. There was only a blinking cursor and a C prompt, and if you wanted that machine to do something, you’d better know enough to tell it what to do. That’s the technology world I came from.

I studied computer science at a time in history when learning technology meant learning what was beneath it. DOS. FORTRAN. COBOL. C. I worked with DBASE III, WordPerfect, and Lotus. I remember floppy disks large enough to make today’s flash drives seem disrespectfully small. (IBM’s original floppy was eight inches across.) 

I remember learning how applications could talk to one another before integration became something we expected software to handle automatically. And I remember the fascination of being introduced to electronic mail before email became so ordinary that most of us now complain about receiving too much of it.

Later, while working for the New York State Department of Housing and Community Renewal, I used what I’d learned to build statewide inventory and contract-monitoring systems. What fascinated me then is what fascinates me now: Technology allowed me to take tasks people were already doing and make the process faster, more organized, and more useful.

We’ve Been Here Before: Why I Don’t Fear AI

That experience is probably why I hear today’s conversation about artificial intelligence (AI) differently from some people. Most notably, I’m not afraid of AI.

To be clear, I’m not fearless because I believe AI is harmless. I’m less fearful because I’ve lived through enough technological change to recognize the pattern.

I tell my staff something all the time: “AI is not a crutch; it’s a tool.” And tools have been disrupting human life since human beings figured out that a sharp stone worked better than a fingernail. 

The legitimate concern today is that this particular tool (AI) is moving extraordinarily fast:

• The International Monetary Fund estimates that nearly 40% of jobs worldwide are exposed in some way to AI-driven change. 
• The World Economic Forum projects enormous labor-market churn by 2030, estimating that broad economic and technological changes could create 170 million jobs while displacing 92 million others. 

These numbers should keep us from casually telling a worker worried about his or her livelihood, “Don’t worry about it.” There is something to worry about. But worrying and preparing aren’t the same thing.

I’ve watched this movie before. Long before I worked in fatherhood, I was a DJ — long before DJing looked anything like it does today. We used vinyl. We rigged equipment together. We used speakers from the house stereo. Headphones weren’t always beautifully engineered pieces of technology. Sometimes you made what you had work.

Then the equipment got better. Turntables evolved. Needles improved. Mixers changed. Drum machines came along. Better recording technology emerged. Vinyl gave way to cassettes, CDs, MP3s, and eventually streaming. Entire industries rose and fell along the way.

But human desire didn’t disappear. People still wanted music. Only the format changed, and this distinction matters enormously in the age of AI.

Blockbuster was once a powerful company because millions of people rented videotapes. Then VHS gave way to DVD. Physical rentals gave way to cable, pay-per-view, and streaming. What looked like a video rental business was actually a business built around people’s desire to watch movies conveniently. Movies survived, but their delivery system evolved.

The same thing happened with letters. Handwriting gave way to typewriters. Typewriters became electric. Word processors arrived. Fax machines sped up transmission. Email changed communication again. Text messaging changed it again. Now many of us speak into our phones and watch our words appear instantly on a screen.

Each and every stage made something that once felt permanent suddenly look fleeting, and every stage frightened somebody.

That fear deserves more compassion than ridicule because technological disruption has consequences. People do lose jobs. Businesses do close. (RIP Blockbuster.) Skills that once commanded a good wage sometimes become less valuable. Families experience these transitions as rent payments, grocery bills, and uncertainty, not as academic discussions about innovation.

The lesson of history isn’t that technological change never hurts people. It does. The lesson is that refusing to acknowledge change rarely stops it. That’s the distinction I believe we’re missing in much of today’s debates over AI.

Some people are asking whether AI should continue developing, as though humanity still has a realistic choice between an AI world and a non-AI world. We don’t. The more useful questions are, What kind of AI world are we going to build? Who will benefit? Who may be harmed? And what responsibility do institutions have to help people adapt?

Employers can’t celebrate AI efficiency while telling displaced workers that adaptation is entirely their problem. Schools can’t continue preparing young people for yesterday’s workplace while complaining that students are using tomorrow’s technology. Leaders can’t demand innovation from employees while refusing to invest in training them.

If AI changes work, then our responsibility isn’t merely technological adoption. It is human preparation.

Something else happened while I was thinking through this piece.

For years, I remembered hearing that human beings use only a small percentage of their brains. I couldn’t remember the exact percentage, but I remembered the idea that there was this enormous reserve of human capacity sitting unused.

So I went looking for the research. Turns out, I remembered it wrong. 

The Value of Human Thinking in an AI World

The popular claim that humans use only 10% of their brains is a myth. Neuroscientists explain that, essentially, we use all parts of our brain, although different regions become more or less active depending on what we’re doing. I love that correction because it actually strengthens the argument I’m making.

Being intelligent doesn’t mean never being wrong. Intelligence includes discovering that something you believed was wrong and changing your thinking. And that may become one of the most important human skills of the AI era.

AI can retrieve information. It can organize thoughts. It can compare documents. It can analyze patterns. It can help someone who has difficulty writing turn an idea into language. It can take an hour of spoken reflection and shape those thoughts into an editorial.

In fact, that is essentially how this piece began. I talked. I remembered. I wandered through DOS and DJ equipment, typewriters and video stores, floppy disks and science fiction. Technology helped me organize what was already inside my head. But the experiences are mine. The memories are mine. The judgment has to be mine.

That’s where I draw the line between using AI and surrendering to it.

The danger isn’t simply that machines may become more capable. The danger is that humans may become less willing to think. 

There’s a difference.

I’ve always enjoyed science fiction for that reason. Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek did more than imagine spaceships. It imagined communicators, screens, instant access to information, remote medical tools, and a world in which distance increasingly became a technological problem to solve.

Science fiction isn’t prophecy. Much of what it imagines never happens. But imagination has always preceded invention. Before we build something, someone has to imagine that the current limits might not be permanent.

Each Generation’s Responsibility in AI Adoption

That brings me to age. When age meets evolution, something interesting happens. Experience can become either wisdom or resistance.

The difference often depends on whether we believe the world owes us continued familiarity. (Spoiler alert: It doesn’t.)

My parents’ generation watched technologies arrive that challenged what they understood about work and communication. My generation encountered DOS, personal computers, email, the internet, cellphones, social media, and smartphones. Today’s children are inheriting AI.

And one day, I suspect they’ll look at the AI systems that amaze us today the way my son might look at an eight-inch floppy disk: Primitive.

What we call “advanced” is often just the current floor.

That doesn’t mean we hand our children this technology without guardrails. Quite the opposite.

We must teach children and young adults how to question AI-generated information, verify sources, protect personal information, recognize bias, maintain original thought, distinguish assistance from dependence, and understand that efficiency isn’t the same as wisdom.

Knowing how to prompt a machine isn’t enough. Our kids need to know when not to ask the machine. They need to understand which decisions require empathy, accountability, moral judgment, relationships, and the irreplaceable experience of being human.

Our children may enter a world where physical strength matters less economically than it once did and where intellectual adaptability, creativity and judgment matter even more. This changes what parents and schools must prepare them for. We once prepared children to operate machines. Now, we need to prepare them to think alongside machines — without letting machines do all the thinking for them.

It may be one of the defining parenting responsibilities of this generation.

The same responsibility applies to those of us who are older.

We can’t tell young people to be lifelong learners while deciding that our own learning stops with whatever technology makes us comfortable.

I know people my age who look at AI and say, “That’s not for me,” and I understand the instinct. But I also remember the C prompt. I remember staring at that green screen and learning what came next.

DOS wasn’t the end of computing. It was an early stage in an ongoing evolution. Microsoft introduced MS-DOS with the IBM PC in 1981. Windows eventually pushed DOS into the background. The graphical interface became normal. The internet became normal. Email became normal. Smartphones became normal.

Artificial intelligence will become normal, too. Then something else will arrive.

That’s what happens when age meets evolution. We discover that growing older gives us no exemption from growing.

The challenge before us isn’t to worship technology or fear it. We should interrogate it, regulate it where necessary, understand its limitations, demand accountability from those who build and deploy it, and ensure its benefits don’t become privileges available only to those who already possess economic and educational advantages.

But to do this, we have to learn it. Use it. Challenge it. Teach with it. Work beside it. And most importantly, remain responsible for what we do with it.

I can still see that green computer screen from decades ago. A cursor blinking against the darkness, waiting for a command. Technology has become infinitely more sophisticated since then. Today’s systems can respond to us in language, generate images, analyze enormous amounts of information, and perform tasks I could hardly have imagined while sitting in front of that early computer.

Yet the most important question has barely changed: What are we going to ask it to do? That question belongs to us. And so does the responsibility for the answer.

Kenneth Braswell is the CEO of Fathers Incorporated and a nationally recognized leader in the responsible fatherhood movement, author of several acclaimed books, including When the Tear Won’t Fall, Strength of the Father, Kwesi and the Ogre, and Too Seasoned to Care. He is the CEO of Fathers Incorporated and host of the I Am Dad Podcast.