Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Some of us have been here before. “AI” is hot again. Perhaps this time the future will be different from the past, but I doubt it. I worked extensively in AI in the 1980s. What I see today is remarkably similar. This is due to what I believe is a gross misunderstanding […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Yes, the technology is here to watch everyone all the time, but do those who have it also have the ability to use it? Each day I see yet another example of the reach of technology. Facial recognition seems to be the most recent target of the they-are-watching-us crowd. Little cameras are […]

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by Dwayne Phillips If we can’t provide a simple representation of a system, perhaps we have a mess and not a system. A: Can you draw me a picture of this? Something that shows how all the parts fit together? B: Uh, well, no. No one has ever asked for such. A: Well, I’m new […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Just because you have a tool in your toolkit doesn’t mean you know what to do with it. Tools tools tools. Everyone in the tech world has lots of tools. If you don’t have a list of tools on your resume, you aren’t hired. Let’s go through some obvious things: Just because […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Once again, we march into the future doing the same thing we did in the past. And it isn’t a bad thing to repeat. There was a time when a President and Vice President of America were doing a photo opportunity “wiring” a school. They were pulling Ethernet cables through conduit so […]

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by Dwayne Phillips A little future prediction about what we used to call automobiles. When the self-driving car actually arrives. We will no longer have: Rear-view mirrors – we’ll have lots of sensors “looking” in all directions. Steering wheel – what would we do with that? Front-facing seats – car interiors will be rectangles that […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Once again, our new “technology” brings us back to where we started a few decades ago. Recently… I walk into Starbucks. And there is a long line. So I sit in my usual spot and start my Internet work. I order my coffee and bagel on my phone. Five minutes into work […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I realize that my plea won’t do any good, but could we please use the right terms in describing “artificial intelligence?” Everybody is doing artificial intelligence (AI) these days. Really? Consider… Artificial intelligence Deep Learning Machine Learning Neural Networks Pattern Recognition The vast majority of what people call AI today is really […]

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by Dwayne Phillips A new high or low in robots in the warehouse. I find this one fascinating. This warehouse “robot” walks a human to the right spot in the cavern of products. The touchscreen shows the human what product to load in the bin. Hence, the robot knows where the product is and how […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Somteimes I miss the analog days. They covered a lot of my mistakes. Handwritten notes let me fudge and smudge and avoid mistakes—like spelling. I could smudge the “i” and the “e” together and put the dot of the “i” somewhere in the middle, and no one could tell that I didn’t […]

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