Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Every now and then we need a new scapegoat, i.e., something that receives the blame for all the faults and mistakes of society. We have one. Ah, the datacenter. It is big, noisy, ugly, and raises my electric and water bills. I hate it. It is the cause of all ills in […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes it is best to go back to the old practice of putting everything on a wall so we can see the entire thing. We used to do this. We would print a document and tape the entire thing to a wall. We would walk along the wall and glance back and […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We have come a long way with AI aiding in decisions. The machine is powerful and new. Or is it? AI is helping us decide what to do. It performs analysis in seconds that would have taken weeks or months. Wow! Look at us now—machine-aided decisions. Great new stuff. Or is it? […]

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by Dwayne Phillips All this $$$ is killing AI. I used to work in AI. That means that I researched things that might allow us to do things that we couldn’t do. I attempted to instruct a computer or, as we used to say, I attempted to write a computer program to do something that […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I don’t like surveillance. Why is someone surveilling me? It is sort of like testing a system I built. But are the testers out to get me or help me? I don’t like surveillance. I don’t like the police state. Why is someone surveilling me? I haven’t done anything. What about the […]

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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 One of the oldest phrases in computing is still true. Rats. Some folks thought AI would fix this. If I meant to find the sum of 2 and 3 but typed 2+4, I would have the wrong answer. Rats. Inputing the wrong information produces the wrong output. So said Charles Babbage some […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Here come new tools. Adopt them or lose your job? Probably not. Yet more recent news about big tech eliminating jobs due to AI. Or perhaps they were eliminated because those companies simply hired too many people and they weren’t doing much of anything on the job. Here are more thoughts on […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Everyone is building a big(ger) datacenter. Fine. Let’s use some sense while we are at it. Everyone is building a big(ger) datacenter. If you are going to build one, you must build it bigger than the one across the fence. Louisiana building a $10 Billion datacenter? Mississippi must build a $15 Billion […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Are we putting all our eggs in one basket? No one seems to be arranging this, but we are putting are our eggs in one basket? A couple of recent news stories caused me to pause and think (a dangerous thing, thinking). Eight tech companies have over 30% of the value of […]

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