I'd gotten a copy of Patrick Henry Winston's "Artificial Intelligence" 2nd edition around 1990. The subject matter was fascinating to me but too far over my hea

I'd gotten a copy of Patrick Henry Winston's "Artificial Intelligence" 2nd edition around 1990. The subject matter was fascinating to me but too far over my head for me to do anything practical. I picked it up a few years later and noodled around w/ neural networks a little bit but it never "clicked". 1994 is around the time I read Steven Levy's "Artifical Life"[1]. I definitely had the excitement the author has about genetic algorithms and classifier systems. They seemed much more approachable than neural networks, too. They appealed to the assembler programmer in me, I guess. I'll echo what others are saying here. Brute force compute has opened the door for so many possibilities. Evolution has had so more "CPU" and "compute substrate" to play with than we can possibly imagine. I'm unsettled by the idea that we're training models we don't actually understand. I'm also not dismissive of the possibilities that they open up, though. [1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/100796/artificial-life-by-steven-levy/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/100796/artificial-l...