Hi, Folks -

Twenty-five or thirty years ago I was one of a handful of folks who had been asked to review some current writings about Artificial Intelligence. I remember coming out of that experience with a sort of "what's the big deal?" thought. :)

I first touched the world of computers in 1964, at a Summer Science thing, where I learned ALGOL and wrote one or more programs that ran on a Burroughs 5500 'desk computer'. A few years later I was learning FORTRAN and feeding it to a massive Georgia Tech computer, using punch cards that had to be handed in for someone else to run overnight. It was the next day before we knew whether or not we'd punched the cards correctly with code we'd correctly written. :)

Commonly heard in those days was the acronym 'GIGO", short for "Garbage In, Garbage Out". Translation: "Even if your code runs perfectly, if the input is garbage, the output will be, too." Or as Tom Lehrer once said, "Life is a little bit like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put in." :)

So, about AI: "What's the big deal?" is what I was thinking because it seemed to me that AI could only be comprised of regular logic-choice coding of the "if-then-else" form -- "If the value is X, then do A; if the value is Y, then do B; else, do C".
And, of course, 'GIGO'. :)

Many years have passed since my initial learning of how one 'talks' to a computer, and even though I continue to hear others speak of AI with great respect and even awe of the magical potential they believe is there - SKYNET, anyone? :) - nothing has changed my mind and led me to see it differently.

Similarly with clones: Is it possible that a bona fide walking-talking replica of some human being can be made and sent forth into the world, without a divine enlivening of the man-made form?

I don't see how. Here's less than 20 minutes with Clif High (thanks, SpaceCommando) on both topics:

Clif High: Woo Tech (Video)

SpaceCommando -- Thursday, 9-Dec-2021 15:48:15

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