Briefly on a.i.

 

So it's kind of hard to be too brief.  But, I've always felt that the term artificial intelligence

was a poor choice of terminology for what a group of people, almost all at M.I.T. where

actually doing in the 1950's.


So what where they doing?  M.I.T. had built the biggest computer in the world back then,

mostly with vacuum tubes, most of which where sent to Northern Minnesota.  So the folks

there had lots of  equipment , and some of these guys decided to make a computer talk.


Well, they were mostly unsuccessful with that, but, we do today have this type of

technology.  ( Oddly ).  But the problem of course was that vacuum tubes, did not

scale, the way those guys needed and of course it would take till the late '50s, 

before transistor technology would so to speak, blossom.  Now when we reflect on

that " blossoming ",  it's kind of gotten mind boggling at least for me, because

I worked on a machine with 8k of memory, and etc., but the point is that the kind

of equipment that is available in comparison to what was available in the 1960's,

it does kind of boggle the mind.  


FYI,  for some reason the initials a.i. don't bother me quite as much and of

course I see nothing particularly wrong with ai as a suffix or prefix, 

that's because of all the time I've spent with forth, or Forth, or whatever.


Also, I should also mention , that because of excess production of vacuum tubes

we ended up with T.V. , proliferating widely, and very quickly.  Very , sort of

weird kind of , truly surreal world, we now live in.  But of course, as human

beings, we've adapted to it.

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