My dad bought a computer!

I was 8 when my father brought home our first computer.

He got back at 11 at night, straight off the second shift. We knew he’d be coming home with the new toy, so my brother and I stayed up waiting for him.

My mother scolded us and tried everything to get us to bed, since we had school the next day. All in vain. We wanted to see that famous computer everyone was talking about, but that in 1997 very few people had at home.

That night, after setting it up and switching it on, we went to bed really late.

The next morning my teacher found me asleep on my desk. She asked me why I’d stayed up so late, and I answered:

“My dad bought a computer!”

Four million old Italian lire for the case, keyboard, mouse, CRT monitor, Sound Blaster sound card and speakers.

My first encounter with these boxes, actually, had come a few years earlier. My uncle was a surveyor, and in his office downtown he had a computer where, to start a program, you had to type white letters on a black background.

There wasn’t much to run back then. The height of fun was Solitaire, Minesweeper and Word, where you could write whatever you wanted on the screen and delete it as many times as you liked.

I’ve always loved tapping on keys and putting something down in black and white. I remember when my father took me to visit Sigonella, in Sicily, where another uncle of mine worked. After admiring a splendid four-engine plane, I spent the rest of the time typing on the typewriter, until the keys jammed.

But back to our computer.

In those years MS-DOS, Windows 95 and then the magnificent Windows 98 ruled the PC market. You had to get hold of the floppy disks – later the CDs – and only then could you finally install the system.

My brother sat at the PC just to play games. I had to understand how it worked. I’d dig into the settings and change everything, to the point of almost breaking it all.

But, as they say, you learn from your mistakes. And I learned a lot from mine.

So I became the family whiz kid for anything to do with the PC.

From all that tinkering I realized the computer could do something more. I just didn’t know what yet.

It took a few years for the stars to align.

It was a second cousin of mine, from Rome, who gave me a book: Visual Basic, CD included.

“What is it?” I asked him.

“This will teach you how to program. How to make your own programs to install on the PC.”

A whole world opened up for me. I could create anything I wanted on that machine.

I started with silly stuff, like a button that opened windows, and worked my way up to the program that cost me countless nights of coding.

Tombola, the Italian bingo.

Watching the randomly drawn numbers fall into place on the board I had built myself was incredibly satisfying.

It was like building a chair from raw wood: cutting the pieces, sanding them, gluing them, painting them, and then seeing that when someone sits on it, it doesn’t break. And they’re even comfortable.

That’s what programming is: the feeling of making something from scratch, with your own effort, with your own wits, with your own sweat.

Programming has been with me my whole life: software and hardware, with all kinds of programmable boards, from microchips to Arduino.

Today, though, programming has gone through a historic change.

Now you can build that chair without ever picking up a saw.

Writing code used to be for the few; today it’s a commodity. Anyone can program – or rather, create a program – just by describing what they have in mind.

Generative AI has let anyone discover what it means to create something of their own without knowing how to write a single line of code.

When OpenAI launched ChatGPT at the end of 2022, nobody really understood what it could do. You could chat with it, it certainly knew a lot more than Google, you could have it write texts.

But it often filled those texts with nonsense passed off as fact: the so-called hallucinations.

As the months went by, though, AI got more and more useful. You could ask it to fix pieces of code where you couldn’t find the problem, or have it create algorithms for problems you’d never have solved so quickly on your own.

That’s exactly what happened to me with my solar inverter. I couldn’t get it to talk over serial with an Arduino-like board. ChatGPT helped me and, after some back and forth, I managed to fix the code and get something working that I might never have managed on my own.

Some people say AI will atrophy our brains. I think so too, but only if we use it without judgment.

Did the calculator atrophy our brains? Did GPS make us lose our sense of direction?

Maybe it did. Or maybe they let us hand the work over to something that does it better than we do, so we still get where we wanted to go, while always keeping the goal and the big picture under control.

Some even argue that what AI creates isn’t really our own work. That the chair, in other words, isn’t ours anymore. But I wonder: then whose is it?

If we use software that does the calculations for us when designing a house, did the software design the house? Nobody would say that.

Just as nobody would say we didn’t write a WhatsApp message simply because the phone suggested the next word.

AI is just a means to multiply our productivity a thousand times and, like any tool, it has to be used the right way.

We need to get used to not writing code anymore, and to not checking, one by one, the lines the AI writes. Just like we trust GPS without checking the map at every intersection. What we need to do instead is steer the AI in the direction we want.

And above all, we must not switch off our brains. We need to switch them on even more, to create things that don’t exist yet.

The world that a Visual Basic book opened up for me can now open up for anyone.

Our own work, with a little help from AI.