There it is a chance for me to offer up some history….that is always a good day…..at least for me….after all it is a Sunday and I like to give a history lesson when I can.
It is all the rage these….that being Artificial Intelligence (AI)….it has invaded all aspects of life from major programming to homes to cars to blog posts….it is everywhere and in just about everything.
Some see the birth of ‘Skynet’ (look it up) while others see it as a boon to human activities….but where did it all begin?
To answer that question I put my skills and my mind to work…..
It’s the simplest questions that are often the hardest to answer. That applies to AI, too. Even though it’s a technology being sold as a solution to the world’s problems, nobody seems to know what it really is. It’s a label that’s been slapped on technologies ranging from self-driving cars to facial recognition, chatbots to fancy Excel. But in general, when we talk about AI, we talk about technologies that make computers do things we think need intelligence when done by people.
For months, my colleague Will Douglas Heaven has been on a quest to go deeper to understand why everybody seems to disagree on exactly what AI is, why nobody even knows, and why you’re right to care about it. He’s been talking to some of the biggest thinkers in the field, asking them, simply: What is AI? It’s a great piece that looks at the past and present of AI to see where it is going next. You can read it here.
Artificial intelligence almost wasn’t called “artificial intelligence” at all. The computer scientist John McCarthy is credited with coming up with the term in 1955 when writing a funding application for a summer research program at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. But more than one of McCarthy’s colleagues hated it. “The word ‘artificial’ makes you think there’s something kind of phony about this,” said one. Others preferred the terms “automata studies,” “complex information processing,” “engineering psychology,” “applied epistemology,” “neural cybernetics,” “non-numerical computing,” “neuraldynamics,” “advanced automatic programming,” and “hypothetical automata.” Not quite as cool and sexy as AI.
AI has several zealous fandoms. AI has acolytes, with a faith-like belief in the technology’s current power and inevitable future improvement. The buzzy popular narrative is shaped by a pantheon of big-name players, from Big Tech marketers in chief like Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella to edgelords of industry like Elon Musk and Sam Altman to celebrity computer scientists like Geoffrey Hinton. As AI hype has ballooned, a vocal anti-hype lobby has risen in opposition, ready to smack down its ambitious, often wild claims. As a result, it can feel as if different camps are talking past one another, not always in good faith.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/07/16/1095001/a-short-history-of-ai-and-what-it-is-and-isnt/
I am an old fart so I do not need help turning my lights on or starting my car….I prefer to do things for myself….at least as long as I can.
I refuse to let some program do my research for me or for that matter write a blog for me.
I am old but not lazy!
Turn The Page!
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”