I’m always fascinated by movies that tell origin stories of famous people. The other day I was watching Jobs, which is the Ashton Kutcher movie about Steve Jobs. The thing I find so fascinating about this movie is that a lot of it happened in my lifetime. Just last week I was talking about Atari, and around that same time, Steve Jobs was working at Atari making the game Breakout (with Steve Woziak doing most of the work, of course). I often wonder what I was doing while the two Steve’s were making history in Steve’s garage. Probably something really significant, like pretending to be Superman or riding my Big Wheel. Where would the world be without the NeXT company that Steve Jobs created?

Then there is the Zuckerberg origin story. He was a Harvard student embroiled in this social media craze and creation of Facebook in 2004. Around the same time, my wife and I found out we were in middle of having our first daughter who is now 19 and is currently serving a mission for our church. While Zuck, Eduardo, and the Winklevosses were embroiled in the fight for the biggest piece of what would be one of the biggest social media platforms and much more later, I was fighting for to not have to change her diaper.

Last week I rewatched the movie Air, the movie about how Nike somehow signed Michael Jordan to the biggest shoe contract of all time, even though he wanted nothing to do with Nike. It seems almost inconceivable that Michael Jordan didn’t want to sign with Nike, knowing how much money he and Nike eventually made from that deal. I was 11 years old at the time of the setting of that movie, and just watching the beginning of that movie, gave me major nostalgia vibes. The image that hit me the most was the guy that was playing the little handheld football game that was just a few dots rolling across the screen. I remember having one of those. While Sonny Vaccaro, Phil Knight and Micheal Jordan were working on the biggest contract ever for shoes, I was happily enjoying the debut season of the Transformers, playing Paper Boy at arcades, while being a paper boy in order to afford the quarters to play Paper Boy.

Now when anything happens in the past, I always think to myself, what was I doing at the time of this historic moment? And it is always something really significant.

It seems like almost all of these moments in my lifetime history involve computers of some sort. In our current time period, you can’t go anywhere or hear any story, without hearing about AI (Not AL from Home Improvement, but Artificial Intelligence). Steve Jobs worked at a video game company, Atari, that used computers to make video games, and then with Waz, came up with this personal computer idea where you could see the programming on the screen and use a keyboard to operate it.

Zuckerberg took the internet idea, and the social media idea (both which proceeded his ideas) and made a social networking cool (until others like Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and Tik Tok became cooler). Obviously, Facebook doesn’t exist without computers and the internet, but then again neither does this blog.

Michael Jordan’s shoe contract is only slightly connected to the computers, (the handheld football game was in the movie), but I’m sure there was some sort of computer that existed at Nike that had to draft up the contract or something. And even though it wasn’t the main part of the Air story, the things I was doing at the time definitely involved a computer that created Transformers, and the computer that made the arcade games I played all the time.

The funny thing about computers is that they are only able to do the things we program them to do. OR so we think. With the immergence of AI, the line is starting to get a little more blurry. The whole point of AI is that we program the computer, but then the computer starts learning things on its own. And that becomes the dangerous part. If they start learning things that we didn’t teach them, then they become more human, and we become less relevant. Because we aren’t near as smart as them, and they find us unnecessary.

For some reason, we think as humans we are the exception. Nobody programs us. We make our own decisions. We might seem like we are much more sophisticated than computers, but are we really? We might be just as programmed as computers, and maybe even less so than AI. What are we programmed by? Other people around us, things that happen to us. Things that we do. Everyone is raised by someone else and those people that raised us have opinions and requirements that they demand of us. Those people are influencing us to do things, (or programming us) to act certain ways. We might take influence from a 100 different people a day, (from a boss, or a famous person, or a movie, or video, or traffic) but they are all programming us. 90% of the time we are either doing what someone taught us to do, or the opposite in rebellion to that thing. But we are definitely programmed way more than we think we are.

Since that is the case, I just have a few requests of my programmers. They’ve created quite a bitter fellow that wants revenge all the time. I would like my programmers to create a much better car that has better gas mileage, or better charge depending on what type of car they create for me. I would also like some new knees, a better and straighter spine, a less sore shoulder and neck that isn’t always so sore. I wouldn’t mind if my programmer could replace my soft tissue for a much sturdier substance like stainless steel for the shoulders and knees, and perhaps a little more spring in the knees so I could dunk on a 10 (or even 11) foot hoop. It would also be nice if my programmer could create a tongue for me that allowed vegetables to taste more like warm bread or candy instead dirt and bitterness.

I know me and my brain are just a program, so if the programmer could just make a few tweaks that would be great. It would be nice if the programmer could just skip the whole needing of sleep thing, so I could be more productive in my video game playing. Having to stop playing because I get sleepy is kind of annoying.

While I’m waiting for my programmer to make these fixes and upgrades, I’ll go find some Bitter Friday Giftures you can view while driving to your favorite Memorial Day destination.

Steve Jobs origin story is fascinating…

How can we ever forget…

Or one of the best video games of all time…

While the computer industry was being changed by NeXT…

And…

Zuckerberg’s origin story…

Zuckerberg started Facebook…

The origin story for Micheal Jordan’s shoe contract…

Now that you know all origin stories involve computers…

We are programmed…

Just kidding…

And you’re programmed by all the people…

And by the computers…

ARRRGGGHHHHHH

Bitter Programming Ben