Comment by fuzzfactor

Comment by fuzzfactor 2 days ago

>skills, which later generations of operators cannot be expected to have.

You can't ring more true than this. For decades now.

For a couple years there I was able to get some ML together and it helped me get my job done, never came close to AI, I only had kilobytes of memory anyway.

By the time 1983 rolled around I could see the writing on the wall, AI was going to take over a good share of automation tasks in a more intelligent way by bumping the expert systems up a notch. Sometimes this is going to be a quantum notch and it could end up like "expertise squared" or "productivity squared" [0]. At the rarefied upper bound. Using programmable electronics to multiply the abilities of the true expert whilst simultaneously the expert utilized their abilities to multiply the effectiveness of the electronics. Maybe only reaching the apex when the most experienced domain expert does the programming, or at least runs the show.

Never did see that paper, but it was obvious to many.

I probably mentioned this before, but that's when I really bucked down for a lifetime of experimental natural science across a very broad range of areas which would be more & more suitable for automation. While operating professionally within a very narrow niche where personal participation would remain the source of truth long enough for compounding to occur. I had already been a strong automation pioneer in my own environment.

So I was always fine regardless of the overall automation landscape, and spent the necessary decades across thousands of surprising edge cases getting an idea how I would make it possible for someone else to even accomplish some of these difficult objectives, or perhaps one day fully automate. If the machine intelligence ever got good enough. Along with the other electronics, which is one of the areas I was concentrating on.

One of the key strategies did turn out to be outliving those who had extensive troves of their own findings, but I really have not automated that much. As my experience level becomes less common, people seem to want me to perform in person with greater desire every decade :\

There's related concepts for that too, some more intelligent than others ;)

[0] With a timely nod to a college room mate who coined the term "bullshit squared"

Animats a day ago

> By the time 1983 rolled around

That early? There were people claiming that back then, but it didn't really work.

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fuzzfactor a day ago

>people claiming that back then, but it didn't really work.
Roger. You could also say that's true today.
Seems like there was always some consensus about miracles just around the corner, but a whole lot wider faith has built by now.
I thoroughly felt like AI was coming fast because I knew what I would do if I had all that computer power. But to all appearances I ran the other way since that was absurdly out-of-reach, while at the same time I could count on those enthusiasts to carry the ball forward. There was only a very short time when I had more "desktop" (benchtop) computing power to dedicate than almost any of my peers. I could see that beginning to reverse as the IBM PC began to take hold.
Then it became plain to see the "brain drain" from natural science as the majority of students who were most capable logically & mathematically, gravitated to computer science of some kind instead. That was one of the only growth opportunities during the Reagan Recession so I did't blame them. For better or worse I wasn't a student any more and it was interesting to see the growth money rain down on them, but I wasn't worried and stuck with what I had a head start in. Mathematically, there was going to be a growing number of professionals spending all their time on computers who would have otherwise been doing it with natural science, with no end in sight. Those kind of odds were in my favor if I could ante up long enough to stay in the game.
I had incredible good fortune coming into far more tonnes of scientific electronics than usual, so my hands were full simply concentrating on natural science efforts, by that time I figured if that was going to come together with AI some day, I would want to be ready.
In the '90's the neural-net people had some major breakthroughs, after I had my own company they tried to get a fit, but not near the level of perfection needed. I knew how cool it would be though. I even tried a little sophomore effort myself after I had hundreds of megabytes but there was an unfortunate crash that had nothing to do with it.
One of the most prevalent feelings the whole time is I hope I live long enough to see the kind of progress I would want :\
While far more people than me have always felt that it already arrived.
In the mean time, whether employed or as an entrepreneur, doing the math says it would have been more expensive to automate rather than do so much manual effort over the decades.
But thousands of the things I worked on, the whole world could automate to tremendous advantage, so I thought it would be worth it to figure out how, even if it took decades :)

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