Never unlearned. What four decades of technological revolutions have taught me

In 1985, I was 11 years old and there was a Macintosh 512k in the study. Two floppy drives, because you couldn't work without them. In one the system floppy, in the other the program. MacPaint, MacDraw, later other software. The mouse was new, the graphics operating system was new, everything was new. For me it was natural, because I didn't know any better.

Forty years later, AI is becoming to me what that Mac 512k was to my parents' house back then. A technology that fundamentally changes the way we work. Not in ten years, but now.

Four revolutions in one career

Between that Mac 512k and now is an accumulation of technological revolutions that I happen to have been close to.

In 1995, I went to art school in Hilversum, the HKU. Internet was then in the Netherlands for three years. During that period, I started working closely with the internet pioneers at XS4ALL and went to hacker festivals. Hacking In Progress in Flevopolder, later Hackers At Large on the TU Twente campus. Tents, data, little sleep, lots of discussions about what this new internet was going to mean.

What nobody knew in 1997 was that it would not be about websites. It would be about what websites could do with each other. After my studies, I started my own company in 2000. The first CMS-driven website I built was for the province of South Holland. Then a four-language website for Hak, "you must have the vegetables from...". Managing content in a database, separating content and design, websites that grew with the organisation. That was the second revolution.

Then came more. Mobile internet made websites suddenly have to work on small screens. The cloud made hosting cheap and scalable. SaaS changed how software was delivered. And now there is AI.

What keeps coming back

What I have learned is that every revolution evokes three reactions.

There are those who feel threatened by it. Who try to stop or ignore the change. That doesn't work. The change comes anyway. These people end up at the mercy of others who did embrace the change.

There are those who thoughtlessly embrace change. Who shout loudly that everything has to change and that what worked yesterday is no longer relevant today. Those go too fast, throw away too much and discover too late that some things were not what they seemed.

And there are those who take a sober view. Who try to understand what the technology actually does, where it is strong and where it falls short. Who consciously choose which parts to adopt and which not. Who don't throw away their craftsmanship but reinforce it with new tools.

That third group does it best. Not in six months; you won't see them on LinkedIn any time soon. But a decade from now, they will be the ones still standing, with business that has grown bigger and stronger.

What AI does for us

At PixelDeluxe, we deploy AI where it really saves time without compromising quality. We experiment, learn and adapt the way we work. That's not a USP to brag about. It is simply responsible entrepreneurship.

What doesn't change is the core of what we do. Clients come to us because we understand how a trade association or company works, how a small secretariat independently manages a platform, which choices will still be right in three years' time. We build that knowledge over years of working with organisations, not in a prompt. AI speeds up our execution, but not our insights.

Never unlearned

The Mac 512k in 1985 taught me that technology is a tool. The Internet in 1995 taught me that new tools open up new possibilities you can't imagine beforehand. The cloud and mobile internet taught me that you have to adapt your way of working to exploit new opportunities.

AI teaches me the same thing, but faster. The revolution before took ten years. This revolution is happening in months.

That's uncomfortable. But also reassuring. Because by now I know how this goes. Looking sober, making conscious choices, maintaining craftsmanship and strengthening it with new tools.

Never unlearned. That's the one thing I know for sure.