I was inclined to remember the man who said it wouldn’t happen.

That it could never happen.

“He” being the learned and semi alcoholic schoolteacher Master McCloone. And it was pocket sized calculators that he was referring to.

McCloone said we were fooling ourselves if we thought we’d some day be going round carrying calculators in our hip pockets. And that’s why we needed to learn the 7 times tables. He was pretty indignant about it and I wasn’t inclined to argue. It was 1988 and his teaching pedagogy involved a stick.

But his forecast seemed blinkered. We knew that Darren Duffy had a sky blue calculator which while too big for a school boys pants, fitted comfortably in the pencil case he’d brought back from a sun holiday in Portugal. The most devastating part of that whole episode was that Duffy arrived home with a golden tan in April and us shivering with gloves and wooly hats. The jealousy was compounded when he whipped out this sunshine yellow pencil case with the new calculator in it. He was unclear what most of the buttons did but who cared. It multiplied effortlessly. We had seen a digital future. And we wanted it.

Still was McCloone’s prediction right or wrong? Could they ever make this sky blue calculator smaller? Small enough to fit in a pocket? I can tell you that there was no consensus reached by the 9 year old boys of St Mary’s National School that day. It all seems so incredibly obvious in retrospect but as Master McCloone later huffed, it’s hard to make predictions about the future.

Technological advance has been relentless since then. The predictions have come quickly too. Right now there’s speculation about what artificial general intelligence could do. A report commissioned by the US State Department warns of the extinction level threat it poses. But don’t start building your doomsday bunker just yet. Avital Balwit chooses to imagine a brighter future where work is no longer necessary and where people are free from financial worries. 25 year old Balwit is Chief of Staff to the Anthropic CEO and is closer to the pulse of AGI than most. She explores how people might feel and if they will or can be happy without employment in an article titled “My Last Five Years of Work”.

Like McCloone and dreams of a pocket calculator, I really struggle to imagine the mass unemployment scenario (she predicts) happening in the first instance. It’s not that AGI won’t create powerful ripples. It’s more that we have the knack of keeping ourselves busy regardless of technological advancements. However it’s very reasonable to concur with Avital’s prognosis that the future looks precarious for certain professions such as software development, contract law and freelance writing. She explains that it’s “not whether the language model is better than the best human, it is whether they are better than the human who would otherwise do that task”. Christ, I’ll be found out very shortly.

If, however, AGI does indeed becomes good enough to make vast numbers of us unemployed then, as Balwit explains, there’s no reason to think that it couldn’t help solve the knock on problems this creates. It’s reassuring logic.

And what about McCloone’s logic? The bit about the calculator never fitting in a pocket? Well, wait ’til you hear.

To be honest, we had all forgot about it until Stephen Mallon landed to class one day with a… you won’t believe this, a calculator on his watch. I know. Shit got crazy. It was a watch. And a calculator. And he could put it and his hand in his fucking pocket. Forget about McCloone. Not even AGI could have seen that coming.