Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips The world of computing has turned upside down. In 2001, Marc Andreesen noticed and noted, “Software is eating the world.” Here I am to notice and note, “Hardware is the new software.” Everyone wants to buy computer hardware. Prices of computer hardware are shooting upwards as demand far exceeds supply. If you […]

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by Dwayne Phillips These chattering bots merely predict the next N word(s). Software has been doing this for many years—nothing new here. In the 1990s (yes, 30 years ago, I am that old), word processors started guessing what word we were trying to type. Some called that “auto complete.” It was nice. Not perfect, but […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I just had a chattering bot filter through layers upon layers of a spreadsheet and provide the answer. After a moment, I realized I could have written a simple program to do that, but that was true for me, not everyone. I just solved a problem with data presented in a spreadsheet. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips History repeats itself as the computer can be fully occupied by the efforts of just a few programmers. There was a time in computing history when there were few programmers. The computers weren’t powerful. A couple of programmers could keep a big computer busy all the time. Then the computers became more […]

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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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