The sun sets on another day…
I found sunset to be beautiful. I thought about artificial intelligence as I drove home from a conference on the same. My mind wandered into strange pathways as I watched the sky flow into colors before me. I was thankful for the sunset and just as thankful for the people that I had spoken to for the last two hours.
I like experts, mostly because of their expertise. I also like to listen to experts to see different points of view to determine just how much of an expert they are. Tonight I listened to 4 experts talking about AI. There is a lot of focus on the AI now, and these experts were considered leaders in their field. As I listened I had many questions about how they approached AI and how they saw an unfolding in the world.
If we go way back in time to 1982 You will find a computer geek taking apart a Commodore Vic 20 to see how it works. Yes that was me and yes I did put it back together and everything worked fine. I did find how the paddle controllers and the potentiometers worked to allow you to play games and to put input into the system without typing on a keyboard.
After working with online systems in the late 70s and the Commodore PET, I was aware of the programming languages available and used my cassette player to load a command interpreter onto the system and start writing code. I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote some more. I wanted something to monitor the house and to interact with and pretty soon I had built a security system out of a Commodore computer and a bunch of strange parts inside little black boxes that connect it to doors and windows.
At the heart of it I wrote code for Max. Having the keyboard scanned as you pressed keys each time a space was pressed the very limited operating system would try to determine what the user was going to want so that it would be able to start working on it. This was done via a cassette which meant it was very slow. Still I had some success with the idea and years later when AJAX came out the idea of read ahead made me smile.
What I was able to build with this minimal system was a console that could monitor all the points and display my house with all the doors and as I asked questions it would give me simple replies. I didn’t really have access to the Internet easily through this system so if it didn’t have information about something it asked for it meaning you could make up anything. This was my vision of AI then later as Eliza and the other AI models came out I tried to interact and give my thoughts.
Max is long since gone but his Titan sized brother lives on as am I is invading the workforce and trying to make our lives easier. AI is definitely the future but I am trying to decide if it is a future driven by the Terminator, where AI decides we all need to die or by CI, the Central Intelligence in the side of a book that tries to enhance the lives of everyone. I am hopeful for the latter.
As we continue to progress and as AI continues to grow I hope that we find experts that have a common vision on the definition of AI and don’t just see it as machine learning. I hope that we have the expertise to see beyond what might be there and somewhere in the middle find a way to keep our private lives private and not be enslaved by the very solutions we have created. There is a lot to think about but as we do I hope we find a way.
So as the sun sets on another day, life is good. AI is good if you use it right. The world is even better because we’re still alive and rolling around the sun making another revolution. Find your voice and find your happiness every day, somewhere in there I hope you find peace, no matter what.
Sleep sweet, love life, and is anyone out there…