We tend to think that markets reflect consumer choice. But the artificial-intelligence boom has been powered by the investment decisions of concentrated capital rather than by consumer demand.
People wanted two computers to be able to talk to each other, so we wired them together when we got sick of walking punch cards and tapes back and forth.
Then we wanted multiple of them to be able to talk to each other so we invented a way to hook more than two together,
Then we wanted that to happen at distances further than we could just run a cable, so a bunch of different solutions were created, one of which was to connect over normal phone lines, one of which required dedicated telco cabling between big university computers and big business computers. Then clever people found solutions to making many smaller computers connect to fewer large computers for business and academic reasons, and then all those got connected and
Voila ! The internet.
It grew organically out of the need to transmit data.
If you meant the world wide web protocols and not the actual internet network, then that also was designed in response to a demand, and got popular because it met a demand.
I come from a chemistry background. Chemistry is one of the first field in which machine learning was first applied. In fact many of the first algorithms and models have been developed by chemists.
This has been a gradual adoption throughout the past 50 years.
How is this different from your description of the internet history? If anything, internet was much faster than that: it took less than 50 years from the first computer to the invention of internet.
And I’m not even considering the first developments in machine learning, which happened pretty much as soon as computing machines were invented.
ARPAnet was also conceived to be a resillient communication network to ensure reliable command and control communication between surviving assets in the event of nuclear attack.
Arguably though, people have constantly been asking for ways to connect and share information with people near and far. Town criers, sign boards, books and letters — the internet is arguably just an extension of these long pursued human interests, things humans have been asking for.
AI doesn’t match in the same way. I guess some people do want sycophants, right or wrong. But I think most people want truth, and want the environment to not be plundered.
I just re-watched Willy Wonka from 1971 - there is a scene in there where they ask the computer to find a golden ticket and it converses in a very AI-like fashion. The 1968 movie 2001 definitely went hard on HAL, the “Intelligent Computer”. People have been pushing hard advancing the technology any way they can since even before then.
I did not read the full article since it is paywalled.
But well, nobody asked for the internet either.
Yes they did.
People wanted two computers to be able to talk to each other, so we wired them together when we got sick of walking punch cards and tapes back and forth.
Then we wanted multiple of them to be able to talk to each other so we invented a way to hook more than two together,
Then we wanted that to happen at distances further than we could just run a cable, so a bunch of different solutions were created, one of which was to connect over normal phone lines, one of which required dedicated telco cabling between big university computers and big business computers. Then clever people found solutions to making many smaller computers connect to fewer large computers for business and academic reasons, and then all those got connected and
Voila ! The internet.
It grew organically out of the need to transmit data.
If you meant the world wide web protocols and not the actual internet network, then that also was designed in response to a demand, and got popular because it met a demand.
I come from a chemistry background. Chemistry is one of the first field in which machine learning was first applied. In fact many of the first algorithms and models have been developed by chemists.
This has been a gradual adoption throughout the past 50 years.
How is this different from your description of the internet history? If anything, internet was much faster than that: it took less than 50 years from the first computer to the invention of internet.
And I’m not even considering the first developments in machine learning, which happened pretty much as soon as computing machines were invented.
ARPAnet was also conceived to be a resillient communication network to ensure reliable command and control communication between surviving assets in the event of nuclear attack.
Or at least thats what the nerds told the rich warlords in order to get funding.
Arguably though, people have constantly been asking for ways to connect and share information with people near and far. Town criers, sign boards, books and letters — the internet is arguably just an extension of these long pursued human interests, things humans have been asking for.
AI doesn’t match in the same way. I guess some people do want sycophants, right or wrong. But I think most people want truth, and want the environment to not be plundered.
I just re-watched Willy Wonka from 1971 - there is a scene in there where they ask the computer to find a golden ticket and it converses in a very AI-like fashion. The 1968 movie 2001 definitely went hard on HAL, the “Intelligent Computer”. People have been pushing hard advancing the technology any way they can since even before then.
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