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The resistance phase always feels permanent. It never is.

Concerns about tech and AI deserve serious conversations, not dismissal.

The only real choice left is whether to be on the freight train or under it.

There I sat, alone in my home office, speaking on camera while an unnamed AI entity interviewed me for a remote writing job.

You genuinely cannot make this up. “She” was poised, thoughtful, and her questions surprisingly perceptive. I answered in one take because I am, after all, a voice actor as well as a copywriter and blogger, and take great pride in how I sound right off the bat.

When it was over, I realized I wasn’t even rattled. That, in itself, felt like a milestone.

You see, I am of a generation that used phone books, paper maps, and submitted my work to newsrooms that smelled like ink and ambition. I watched as many of my peers responded to the advent of technology the way people respond to a car accident — with a long, horrified stare, followed by an insistence that someone should do something. I get it. What I can no longer do is share it.

Here is what I keep coming back to: the freight train left the station without asking for a show of hands. The only real choice left is whether to be on it or under it. (And no, this is not written by AI).

Every generation has had its reckoning. When the internet swallowed the newspaper industry, “in memoriam" op-eds were everywhere. But they were premature. Journalism didn’t die — it mutated. Writers who once filed stories to editors now build audiences directly through newsletters and platforms like Substack and Medium, sometimes reaching more readers than a mid-sized metro daily ever did. The form collapsed but the function survived. Fact checking? A whole ‘nuther ball game. But what once looked like an ending turned out to be an awkward, uncomfortable beginning.

Books told a similar story, though not the one most people remember. E-book sales exploded through 2014, then leveled off. Instead of print disappearing — it actually grew by nearly 25% between 2014 and 2024. Physical books carried something that digitization couldn’t replicate: the tactile pleasure of a page, the intimacy of holding a story in your hands and the smell of print on paper. Audiobooks? They have their purposes in an ADHD, attention-zapped, multitasking world and are pure gold to the visually and learning-impaired.

Some things resist digitization not out of stubbornness but because they offer something screens simply don’t. The lesson isn’t that technology always wins. It’s that the things with genuine emotional resonance find a way to persist alongside it.

GPS, on the other hand, was a quieter conquest. Most of us stopped noticing the moment we stopped using our book-sized Thomas Bros maps. The trade off we didn’t account for? Research published in Scientific Reports found that habitual GPS use leads to a measurable decline in spatial memory — the greater the reliance, the steeper the drop. We traded an internal skill for an external convenience, and we did it so gradually it barely registered. That trade-off is worth sitting with, but not as a GPS basher (only the most committed contrarian navigates by the stars in 2026) — but as a reminder that every technological gain tends to cost us something we don’t fully notice until it’s gone.

Phone prompts. Heavy sigh. Press 1 for English, 2 for billing, and 3 if we’re about to lose our minds. Maddening, and ubiquitous all at once, but almost no company on earth would go back to the alternative. Efficiency extracted a toll on patience and replaced it with something colder. We grumble about it. Then we press 1.

This is the texture of technological change: inconvenient, imperfect, and ultimately irreversible. The resistance phase always feels permanent. It never is.

So what does psychology have to say about all of this? Research consistently links cognitive flexibility — the ability to adapt to new information and shifting circumstances — to better well-being in older adults. Studies show it is positively related to self-perception of aging, a stronger sense of self-efficacy, and overall quality of life. In other words, staying open isn’t just pragmatic. It is, in a measurable sense, protective. Rigidity has a cost and it's a big one. Just ask your grown children.

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But let's be careful here. There is a difference between resignation and genuine acceptance. Resignation bitterly says “I have no choice, so I will comply.” Acceptance says, “I see what this is, I understand the trade-offs, and I am choosing to engage instead of grieve. One closes you off. The other keeps you curious.

I am not out there in the cheap seats cheerleading for AI. Yet. There are real concerns — about job displacement, about what happens to human creativity when it competes with machines that never sleep, and about the erosion of things we haven’t yet thought to protect. Those concerns deserve serious conversations, not dismissal.

But I sat across from an AI interviewer and found her “voice” pleasant and her questions thoughtful. I talked through ideas with a cyber-language model and found the exchange genuinely useful.

None of that makes me naive about what’s coming. It makes me a participant in it, which feels considerably better than the alternative.

Now entering my 75th year, I know the freight train waits for no one. You don’t have to love it. But you might consider getting on board.

Dahmani, L. & Bohbot, V.D. (2020). Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation. Scientific Reports. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-62877-0

El-Sayed, M.M. et al. (2024). Cognitive flexibility’s role in shaping self-perception of aging, body appreciation, and self-efficacy among community-dwelling older women. BMC Nursing. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12912-024-01874-4

Newprint/Circana BookScan data. (2025). Book Sales Statistics and Trends. https://www.newprint.com/blog/book-sales-statistics

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