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The personal computer & the internet clicked for me because I saw them as personal enables, as endlessly flexible systems that we could gain mastery over & shap

The personal computer & the internet clicked for me because I saw them as personal enables, as endlessly flexible systems that we could gain mastery over & shape as we might. But with AI? Your comparison to going to the moon feels apt. We're deep into the age of the hyper scalers, but AI has done far more to fill me with dread & make me think maybe Watson was right when he said: > I think there is a world market for maybe five computers This has none of the appeal of computing that drew me in & for decades fed my excitement. As for breakthroughs, I have much doubts; there seems to be a great conflagration of material & energy being poured in. Maybe we can eek out some magnitudes of efficiency & cost, but those gains will be mostly realized & used by existing winners, and the scope and scale will only proportionately increase. Humanity will never catch up to the hyper-ai-ists.

pbourke 3y ago
> The personal computer & the internet clicked for me because I saw them as personal enables, as endlessly flexible systems that we could gain mastery over & shape as we might. I feel the same way. Developments in computing have evolved and improved incrementally until now. Networks and processors have gotten faster, languages more expressive and safer, etc but it’s all been built on what preceded it. Gen AI is new-new in general purpose computing - the first truly novel concept to arrive in my nearly 30 years in the field. When I’m working in Python, I can “peer down the well” past the runtime, OS and machine code down to the transistors. I may not understand everything about each layer but I know that each is understandable. I have stable and useful abstractions for each layer that I use to benefit my work at the top level. With Gen AI you can’t peer down the well. Just a couple of feet down there’s nothing but pitch black.

pbourke 3y ago

> The personal computer & the internet clicked for me because I saw them as personal enables, as endlessly flexible systems that we could gain mastery over & shape as we might. I feel the same way. Developments in computing have evolved and improved incrementally until now. Networks and processors have gotten faster, languages more expressive and safer, etc but it’s all been built on what preceded it. Gen AI is new-new in general purpose computing - the first truly novel concept to arrive in my nearly 30 years in the field. When I’m working in Python, I can “peer down the well” past the runtime, OS and machine code down to the transistors. I may not understand everything about each layer but I know that each is understandable. I have stable and useful abstractions for each layer that I use to benefit my work at the top level. With Gen AI you can’t peer down the well. Just a couple of feet down there’s nothing but pitch black.