When Trent was little, he called himself Mean Tough Cowboy Rogers, and he thought he would like to ride bulls in rodeos like his dad and I had when we were teenagers and young twenties.
We had a VHS video of the top bucking bull no one had been able to ride, named Bodacious. Trent watched it over and over, and when I asked him what he would say to the cowboys that got bucked off of Bodacious, he’d say, “Just don’t turn loose.”
This little boy who has grown into an especially smart young man took on life in the same way — however, thankfully, in a totally different direction.
We are the Baby Boomers. There are a lot of us, but we are the senior generation who are dying off fast. What is so sad is we hear so many say, “I am glad I am going out instead of coming in.” Most of it is because of technology we do not understand. A very large percentage of us retired early when we had to learn to use the computer to continue working.
We were born right after WWII, 1945–1965. Our parents came home from the war as the mighty U.S. who had claimed ultimate victory. They came home as conservative, God-fearing people who had witnessed the horribleness of war and were determined to make their lives good.
We were born into a beautiful country. The inventions and improvements in inventions came fast and furious. However, things had belts, motors, and on-and-off switches. All kinds of farming equipment became priority, because our parents felt like they must feed the world because so much of it was destroyed by the war. Focus was on bigger trucks and tractors and all kinds of farming equipment to make farming more productive, faster, and more convenient, and on oil and steel, and all the inventions of components to make the improvements. It created a U.S. and even a lot of the world where job opportunity was ultimate. All young men were able to have a job if they were educated or not, but willing to work hard.
We were taught to work because our parents lived through the market crash of 1929 which caused the Great Depression, when there were no jobs and no help from the government. It made our parents, that survived, tough, and they passed it on to us.
Most of us both had career jobs, which helped us to have the conveniences and houses of our own. Our parents were the Waltons, but we became the Cleavers with Fonzie, Elvis, Johnny Cash, and the Beatles. The opportunity was non-stop.
Nobody questioned how the TV worked. Nobody questioned the washing machine. The computer was, in a way, the first invention that expected you to understand it before you could use it — and that was new.
When I told Trent I just don’t understand how a computer works, his answer triggered the idea of writing this book together. He told me, even as much as he uses the computer, being educated in computer science and working with it all the time, he really doesn’t know the dynamics of how it actually works — he just enjoys the fact that it does. I thought, oh my goodness, as smart and as educated as this young man is, and actually a software engineer for the FAA, and he doesn’t need to know how it actually works to enjoy the fact that it does? It made me think maybe I don’t need to know how it works if I ever want to learn to use it.
I was born in 1998. Grew up with computers the way Boomers grew up with TV — never questioned them, just used them. Got interested in technology, earned a full scholarship to UT Dallas, studied Computer Science and Cognitive Science, and became a software engineer at the FAA. Grandma Rogers asked how a computer works, and the honest answer was: I don’t really know either. I just enjoy the fact that it does. That might be the whole thesis of this book.
What my dad was proud of when he talked about being a young man was he was able to stay in the U.S. because they trained him in radar. As a child, as a young adult, even when I was 40 and he died, I had never asked him what he actually did in radar. Now I have heard you mention it in your work with the FAA. Because you understand it, can you explain what it might have done during WWII and how it has evolved from there?
Radars are truly incredible technology, and while the fine details of how they work on the inside are amazing and complicated, the fundamental concept they operate on might feel more familiar than you would think.
Most people already know how to count the seconds between a flash of lightning and the thunder to figure out the range of the storm. That works because light is so much faster than sound. Echolocation (what bats use) and sonar (what submarines use — same idea as the bats) work the same way: send out a sound, wait for the echo, time the round trip to figure out the distance.
By the 1940s, radio was already in most American homes — families gathered around it for music and news. Radar uses those same invisible waves, but instead of carrying a signal, it sends out a pulse and listens for what bounces back. The WWII generation figured out how to time those echoes accurately enough to detect planes behind clouds, far beyond the horizon.
The name says it all: RAdio Detection And Ranging. Detection — figuring out what’s out there, what’s a plane and what’s not. Ranging — figuring out how far away it is, the same idea as counting seconds with lightning. Detecting which echoes are planes and which echoes are other things is most of what I work on to this day. Most of what we do with radar today is built on what that generation figured out then.
Then there came this couple of kids that just messed up our world — Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
Was there a computer before them? Was the technology somewhere in the world and they made it usable? Would you say they invented it, created it, or made it usable?
My friend told me, when she had to put the whole library on the computer, said there was somewhere a computer as large as a big room.
When Bill Gates and Paul Allen were teenagers in Seattle, computers already existed — some as big as a whole room, just like your friend said. But you had to basically be an engineer to use one. They figured out how to change that. They didn’t invent the computer. They made it so that a regular person could sit down at a desk and use one without having to understand how it worked on the inside. It’s a little like driving a car — you don’t have to know how the engine works to drive one. What Gates and Allen did was make it so the skill you had to learn was driving, not being a mechanic. Learning to drive isn’t always easy, but it’s a lot easier than learning to build an engine.
At the most basic level, a computer stores information using tiny, microscopic components that are either charged or not charged — like millions of tiny batteries that are either full or empty. We just call them ones and zeros because it’s a convenient way to name two states. The thing itself is just a charged or uncharged battery — the ones and zeros are just what we call them.
It’s a lot like Morse code: dots and dashes don’t mean anything on their own, but people agreed on patterns that let them send real messages. Computers do the same thing with ones and zeros — agreed-upon patterns that represent letters, numbers, and everything else. When your friend at the library put all those books on the computer, she was basically translating them into a kind of Morse code the machine could store.
We heard the other day there is more information on a cell phone now than all the technology they had when we actually went to the moon. Oh, these great cell phones — they have helped some of us skip having to learn to use the computer.
That one idea — making the computer usable — changed everything. Those room-sized machines full of ones and zeros shrank until they fit in your pocket, and now your phone holds more information than they had for the entire Moon landing.
So many questions we don’t know how to ask.
Would be so wonderful for a stroke victim left unable to speak — the frustration, unbelievable. Do you think there will ever be the possibility for the technology to connect the brain of thought back to speech? An amazing thought.
If you help us to understand the basics about the brain and how we think, I think the majority of us would be very interested in the simplified basic steps, all the way to what you think might be the future — which is so far beyond our comprehension, because we were so busy living our lives we didn’t realize what was going on in technology until we are bombarded with all this unbelievable stuff.
The brain works with the presence and absence of electrical signals too — neurons fire or they don’t. But unlike a computer’s tiny batteries, neurons never sit still, and they’re always listening to lots of other neurons at once. The idea of “neural networks” came from trying to make computers work a little more like that. It took decades before computers were small and fast enough to actually do it. That’s what ChatGPT and all the AI you hear about is based on — very fast pattern-finders, built loosely on how brains are wired.
Neuralink and other brain-computer interfaces are starting to connect chips directly to the brain. Brains and computers both run on electrical signals — that’s what makes the connection possible. Early versions are already helping people who are paralyzed type with their thoughts, and the goal is to eventually help stroke victims speak again. Some wonder whether a person with a chip in their brain is still fully human. But it’s really no different from a pacemaker — having a piece of you that’s mechanical or digital doesn’t make you a computer. It just means that part of you is based on one.
When we got serious about writing this book with Trent, we were even more encouraged when he told us he was even concerned about some of the things that are going on with technology, and we were even more excited for him when he told us he was interested and taking classes in the safety field of AI. We think 99% of Baby Boomers worry it could get out of control real fast, if it hasn’t already.
A lot of Baby Boomers worry that AI could get out of control. A lot of people who work in technology share that concern. AI safety is a real field, with real people working on it full-time, and it’s part of why I started studying it. The instinct to ask whether anybody is paying attention — that instinct is right. It might be the most important question there is.
It is hard for us Baby Boomers to accept vehicles that drive themselves. Would they be much safer than we are as old drivers? Could we be able to keep driving longer if cars drove themselves?
They sound scary, and it makes sense that they do. But they don’t get tired, they don’t get distracted, and they can see in every direction at once. Early data from companies like Waymo shows their self-driving cars are involved in roughly 85% fewer injury crashes than human drivers — about six or seven times safer. And for seniors who might otherwise have to stop driving, they could mean staying independent a lot longer.
People like Elon Musk have done genuinely impressive things — Neuralink, SpaceX, Starlink restoring communication after storms. He’s a smart guy. But being smart enough to build something isn’t always the same as being wise enough to know whether you should. Sometimes smart people do dangerous things because they’re exciting, not because they’re good. I think he’s gotten to where he’s more interested in what’s possible than in being careful about it. That’s part of why AI safety work matters.
Technology is moving fast. The generation that watched all of this happen — from belts and motors to AI — has earned the wisdom and the right to ask hard questions about where it’s going.