Technology History – Scott Loftesness

The Static We Left Behind

There was a time when the airwaves crackled with a distinct, unpolished kind of magic. It wasn’t the curated broadcast of a corporate radio station, but the raw, spontaneous voices of strangers sharing the same lonely stretch of highway or suburban night. When I previously wrote about the rise and decline of CB radio, I didn’t fully anticipate how deeply the piece would resonate. The influx of emails, comments, and shared memories pointed to a singular, striking truth: we don’t just miss the hardware of the 1970s; we miss the serendipity of the connection it offered.

In the decades since the fiberglass whip antenna faded from the American automotive silhouette, our society has become infinitely more “connected.” We carry glass slabs in our pockets capable of reaching anyone, anywhere, in an instant. Yet, paradoxically, we often find ourselves feeling more profoundly isolated. The modern digital landscape is largely an algorithmic echo chamber, meticulously designed to feed us reflections of what we already know and who we already are.

CB radio, by contrast, was a geographic lottery. You turned the dial, adjusted the squelch, and were instantly thrust into a transient community composed entirely of whoever happened to be within your physical radius. It was messy, chaotic, occasionally absurd, and deeply human. It was a localized town square operating on a 27 MHz frequency.

“We traded the spontaneous for the scheduled. We swapped the local for the global… We traded the crackle of static for the endless, frictionless scroll of the feed.”

Reflecting on the quiet that eventually fell over Channel 19, it becomes clear that the decline of CB radio was more than just a technological shift—it was a cultural one. We traded the spontaneous for the scheduled. We swapped the local for the global, and the intimately anonymous for the hyper-public. We traded the crackle of static for the endless, frictionless scroll of the feed.

But the fundamental human impulse that fueled the CB craze never actually disappeared. The desire to reach out into the dark void and hear a human voice echo back—the spirit of “Breaker 1-9, is anyone out there?”—remains hardwired into our psychology. We see fragmented echoes of it today in late-night Reddit threads, in niche Discord servers, and in the fleeting, unscripted interactions of multiplayer gaming. We are all still, in our own ways, searching for a shared frequency.

Perhaps the true legacy of the CB radio isn’t a cautionary tale of obsolescence, but a gentle reminder. It reminds us that in our highly polished, curated digital world, there is still immense, undeniable value in the unscripted encounter. We haven’t lost the need to connect; we are simply navigating a world with too much noise and too few open channels.

Betting on Ourselves in the Age of AI

Every time tech takes a leap, we assume we’re finally obsolete. The current panic, which Greg Ip recently picked apart in the Wall Street Journal, is AI. We hear endless predictions of “economic pandemics”—server farms wiping out white-collar jobs overnight, leaving everyone broke and adrift.

It’s a terrifying story. It also completely ignores history.

Ip highlights the main flaw in the doomsday pitch: it misreads how markets work. We treat labor like a fixed pie. If a machine eats a slice, we assume that slice is gone forever.

“Technological advancements always cost some people their jobs—those whose skills can be easily substituted by tech. But their loss is more than offset through three other channels. The new technology enhances the skills of some survivors… it helps create new businesses and new jobs; and it makes some stuff cheaper…”

That cycle holds up. Take the 1980s spreadsheet panic, a perfect parallel. When Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel hit the market, bookkeepers freaked out. Then the number of accountants and financial analysts exploded. Software didn’t kill the need to understand money. It just did the math, letting people focus on strategy.

We’re seeing the exact same thing with software development. Coding isn’t dead. As AI makes writing basic code cheaper, demand for software just goes up. That requires more humans to architect systems and supervise the AI. The pie just gets bigger.

But my skepticism about the AI apocalypse goes beyond economics. It’s about why we pay people in the first place.

We don’t just buy services; we buy accountability. Ip notes that radiologists kept their jobs because patients want a real person explaining their scans. Google Translate has been around since 2006, yet the number of human translators has jumped 73%. When the stakes are high—a legal contract, a medical diagnosis—we want a human in the room. We want a real person on the hook.

The danger isn’t that AI will replace us. The danger is that we panic and forget our own adaptability. The transition will hurt, and specific jobs will disappear. We’ll need safety nets. But betting against human ingenuity has always been a losing wager.

Large language models are tools, not replacements. They handle the cognitive heavy lifting, much like tractors handled the physical heavy lifting. Tractors didn’t end farming; they just killed the plow.

Work will change. We’ll have to figure out which of our skills are actually “human.” But as long as we want the presence and accountability of other people, there will be jobs. We just have to evolve. And we do. It’s the human spirit. Or is this time “really different”?

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