|
Home » xyzzy » Dungeon » AI, AI (A, Yi Yi Yi)
| Re: AI, AI [message #99669 is a reply to message #99640] |
Sat, 08 August 2026 18:12   |
 |
Wayne Parham
Messages: 19083
Registered: January 2001
|
Illuminati (33rd Degree) |
|
|
This one is close to home and personal for me, although probably not in the same way it is for you. The hype for most people is a curiosity or annoyance, or both. Maybe something of a fear, actually, for many people. That one is like so many others in the last 200 years.
For me, those are all beside the point. I see any new technology as displacement, not replacement. That has always been the case. Of course, displacement can be uncomfortable, so I don't discount that. But I would remind everyone that even the "lowly word processor" was a game changer just 50 short years ago.
In the 1970s, there were almost no word processors. If you had one, it was a dedicated machine. There wasn't one in your company's million dollar mini-computer, not even one in your corporation's multi-million dollar mainframe. Secretaries typed everything on typewriters, and they had a healthy stock of whiteout for corrections.
So when word processors came out - seems like just yesterday - secretaries were probably pretty scared. But there was actually nothing to fear - they just changed keyboards from their IBM Selectrics to their IBM PCs, first running WordStar, then Word Perfect and then Microsoft Word - Which is what they still use now.
Same timeframe - there was no internet in the 1970s. Well, there was one, but it wasn't anything anybody knew about but us computer guys. Now people don't think they can live without it.
I was a computer guy then and I'm still a computer guy now. Back then, I was kinda isolated from acquaintances in that most had no idea what a kilobyte was. None knew what a CPU was. Nothing in my world was familiar to anyone I knew, other than the few folks that were also computer professionals. It was truly a very small field.
And back then, the folks into machine intelligence were an even smaller group. Marvin Minsky was at MIT and Douglas Hofstadter was at Indiana University. Those were the only two that had any visibility at all. Others made significant contributions, but most people had never heard of them. For that matter, most hadn't heard of Minsky or Hofstadter either, but they were at least somewhat visible in the tiny tech community.
Hofstadter wrote a best selling book about AI, but most people that read it weren't actually into machine intelligence. It was just an entertaining read for them. Actually, it had entertaining excerpts for them. Good coffee table material for intellectuals to philosophize about. Nothing wrong with that at all - it was fun to talk about - but my point is that not many people at all were truly into this stuff.
I was. I was into it then, and I'm into it now. I started at a time when one could completely understand every aspect of the machine - its hardware, it's operating system and its applications software. You programmed your machine in its native language - machine code, written in binary. And you sometimes had the luxury of writing in a higher-level language too, but not always.
I now write modern software, and have applied for patent on the next generation of AI, which I call Concepts Models. Yann LeCun calls his creations World Models, and they are somewhat similar. I'd like to use them together. LeCun's stuff is cool - he's from "those days" too. These are the next evolutions, and they're awesome.
LLMs have proven themselves to be surprisingly useful, but they aren't ever going to be that "singularity" that the younger generation of computer engineers and scientists hope they will be. They just don't have what it takes, even with a few thousand datacenters, each with hundreds of thousands of processors.
So it's very weird to me to see a world where everyone knows about this stuff, at least enough to talk about it. Everyone these days knows computer jaron. Many know moderately sophisticated computer technologies and most know the "basic stuff." It's weird to me 'cause I've been around all this so long. It's my whole life.
And it's weird to me also because I hear so many people talking about these technologies in the media. I see so many executives talking about it too. Most of them actually know almost nothing. They can't even spell binary. Yet it's the latest buzz, and it's oh-so popular to talk about.
Best example - How long have we been hearing about self-driving cars?
We really need a delete button for the talking heads out there.
So it's weird to me 'cause I'm no longer isolated with knowledge that is not popular. Now it's popular for everyone. But I'm not sure that's better. It actually seems quite annoying. Way too many people talking with absolutely nothing useful to say. They're just making stuff up. Maybe they're the chatbots?!! 
|
|
|
|
Current Time: Sun Aug 23 21:35:14 CDT 2026
|
Posting Rules
Members
Search
Help
Register
Login
Get a T-Shirt!
