Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Expert systems live on after 40 years. Well, sort of. I worked in artificial intelligence research in the mid-1980s. We had an AI boom in that decade. Then a winter and a boom or two since then. Back in 1985, we had “expert systems.” (I am old enough to remember this. I […]

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by Dwayne Phillips If a computer is used in a system, the data is stored and can be retrieved. This story is making the rounds on the Internet…Tesla was involved in a crash lawsuit. Tesla said, “We don’t have any data.” A hacker found the data in the car. Put this down next to the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Borrowing from The Software Crisis of the 1990s, I declare The AI Crisis. A recent report from MIT claims that 95% of AI projects attempted by well-meaning folks fail. Gosh. That is a pretty high percentage. I remember the software crisis of the late 1980s and all through the 1990s. Reports like […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The makers of the first generation of the home computer are passing. I saw recently that Steve Wozniak is now 75 years old. I clearly recall the first time I saw an Apple computer. It was early in 1980. I was still a senior engineering student at LSU. I was in one […]

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by Dwayne Phillips AI agents are all the rage. Really? Of course these things are old news. OpenAI released the ChatGPT Agent recently. Wow! Great stuff! Okay, it is pretty good stuff. Here is a prompt in plain, everyday English. When something happens, do something. Here are instructions in plain, everyday English. Do that complex […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I can do something wrong. I can do something right, but be mistaken in how I tell the story of the doing. There is a difference. Is one mistake better? I can do something wrong. For example, not tighten the lug nuts properly when I change a tire on a car. I […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I have been able to write drafts faster and with much higher quality than other writers I know. I have, unknowingly, been writing at “pulp speed.” I stumbled across this concept of writing at pulp speed recently. It came from a blog post by Dean Wesley Smith. Back in the old days […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We store more information on computers. And we FIND it all. Back in ’07 (2007 for those who don’t know an old old way of writing the dates in the first decade of a century), I had a conversation with a senior manager of a government agency. Like 98.6% of senior managers, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Every generation seems to have its magic technology just about to burst on the scene and doing something wonderful and financially rewarding. Most of the time, nothing happens. Back in the early years of this century, carbon nanotubes were the thing to discuss. We were to build computers thinner than a piece […]

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by Dwayne Phillips When confronting something that looks odd, show it to an old person. They may have seen this before and can explain it. Many years ago, a programmer saw an odd way to demodulate amplitude modulation. The method didn’t resemble any of the equations or diagrams regarding amplitude modulation (AM, or that radio […]

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