Wednesday at 7:30pm is my favourite time of the week. It’s when I go to Greenock Writers’ Club for my weekly fix.
We’re a diverse mix of ex-teachers, doctors, support workers, engineers and even the odd ex-prisoner. When I look around the room, it feels like a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
We all share a love of words and of story. The nuance of how one small change can turn an ordinary sentence into something remarkable.
On Wednesday we were given a few prompts. This week I chose:
Write about a weary time traveller.
I liked the idea, someone exhausted by time, fed up always moving and wanting to settle somewhere and call it home.
I won’t bore you with my story, but for some reason I made my time traveller Greenock’s most famous inventor, James Watt.
Watt, is one of the most widely used names in the world, yet few people outside of Greenock have heard of him. His name is read billions of times a day in homes and businesses, and is printed on almost every electrical item in the world.
His fame is for improving the steam engine by introducing the separate condenser, making energy far more efficient.
He also created the idea of horsepower to explain power in practical terms which led to the unit of energy we now know as the watt.
In my time traveller story, he didn’t die in 1819, he invented a quantum condenser and became a time traveller, traversing time and arriving back in Greenock in 2026, exhausted.
That got me thinking about my post today. What would James Watt think of AI? Would he see it as a threat or as a tool that would help him push the boundaries of invention further?
When you think about it, Watt didn’t set out to have his name printed across the world. All he was doing was solving a problem to improve something that already existed.
And that brings me to where we are today.
The big talking point is AI. As with all new technologies, it brings fear, noise and the idea that everything is about to fall into some dystopian world.
Personally, I think it’s the wrong way to look at it. There is always some pain as commerce adapts, but in the long run it will create more employment and I see a greater opportunity for us all. There are thousands of things in this world that need improving.
Think about the small things that have changed the world:
Clothes pegs.
Paper clips.
Velcro.
Post-it notes.
Simple ideas. Small improvements. Massive impact.
We have more tools than any generation before us, AI, design software, automation, 3D printing. The ability to test, build and refine ideas faster than ever before would have been a dream for James Watt, and yet we all have it at our fingertips.
The barrier isn’t tools anymore, it’s imagination.
So the question is no different from the one Watt was asking in his time:
What’s not working and how could it be better?
What slows you down?
What feels clunky, outdated, overcomplicated?
The tools are there for everyone. How can you make something work better?
