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From the perspective of the 1970s many of these problems would have appeared insanely hard to solve to the point of impossibility. Consider the idea of buildin
by api 3y ago
From the perspective of the 1970s many of these problems would have appeared insanely hard to solve to the point of impossibility.
Consider the idea of building insane torch rockets like those in The Expanse or Avatar. We’d need something like small compact fusion reactors or antimatter manufacturing at scale, not to mention enormous advances in materials and superconductors and such.
That looks impossible today and we know the shape of the problem. In 1973 the gap between computers of the time and those of today was similar to the gap between a chemical rocket and a relativistic antimatter blowtorch, but on top of that nobody really knew what approaches to AI might even bear fruit. We had way more unknown unknowns between us and HAL 9000 than we have between us and a starship.
It took many doubling of compute power, the accumulation of petabytes of training data, and thousands and thousands of researchers not just exploring the math but also tinkering (“graduate student descent” as it’s known in machine learning).
Definitely forgivable to think this might not be achievable in 1973.
- doug_durham 3y agoI think in scale only. We are still using the same computer architectures, operating systems, and base networking protocols available in 1973. The scale of clock speeds and storage amounts would be astonishing to someone back then. I also believe that if you told them that you'd go to a terminal and type "ls" to list the contents of a directory they would be astonished that that hadn't changed in 50 year.
- BlueTemplar 3y agoI have an "encyclopedia of cybernetics" for kids books from the 1960s-1970s. Among other things it has two chapters on artificial intelligence (mentioning neural networks), and another on Moore's Law, trying to extrapolate computing power up to IIRC our time. IIRC their predictions/speculations turned to be pretty accurate, except for the photonic and DNA-based computers...
- eigenvalue 3y agoSounds like an awesome book! I wish more kids books were sophisticated like that.