
Artificial Intelligence as the year 2000 approaches (1992) - flummox
https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1145/135226.135237
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neonate
For those who don't know, Maurice Wilkes invented subroutines and microcode.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Wilkes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Wilkes)

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Ididntdothis
I always find it fascinating things like subroutines that are obvious to us
now had to be invented by someone. You can easily imagine an alternate history
where computing would look totally differently.

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thaumasiotes
> I always find it fascinating things like subroutines that are obvious to us
> now had to be invented by someone.

This is just the anthropic principle. The fact that somebody was first doesn't
mean something wasn't obvious.

I like to complain about De Morgan's Laws, which state that:

(1) If neither of two things is true, then they're both false. (And vice
versa.)

(2) If two things aren't both true, then one or both of them are false. (And
vice versa.)

Augustus De Morgan lived in the 1800s, but obviously these laws were well
known for many millennia before him. Having these laws named after you is the
honorable-mention-in-the-Special-Olympics of making discoveries. It's an
insult to the concept of naming things after people.

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spectramax
That's a brilliant way to argue about it, makes total sense. What would you
say is invented by total happenstance and the world would be totally different
if the person had not?

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Ididntdothis
I would say alphabets, languages, religions, fashions.

Numbering systems? Is there an advantage in going base 10 vs base 11? Now that
I think about it base 8 may be better.

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spectramax
Arguably, Duodecimal would have been better. 12 is divisble by a large number
of factors and it has some more interesting aspects outlined here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal)

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_bxg1
Came here to say this.

We got 10 instead because we have 10 fingers to count on.

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abjKT26nO8
And when was the last time you counted something on your fingers that was more
than 3?

Also, quoting parent's link:

 _> It is possible to count to 12 with the thumb acting as a pointer, touching
each finger bone in turn. A traditional finger counting system still in use in
many regions of Asia works in this way, and could help to explain the
occurrence of numeral systems based on 12 and 60 besides those based on 10, 20
and 5. In this system, the one (usually right) hand counts repeatedly to 12,
displaying the number of iterations on the other (usually left), until five
dozens, i. e. the 60, are full._

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_bxg1
> And when was the last time you counted something on your fingers that was
> more than 3?

???

I'm not talking about me, I'm talking about the thousands of years of human
history that got us here?

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melling
Vernor Vinge’s 1993 Technological Singularity is worth a read:

[https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/book98/com.ch1/vinge.singularity...](https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/book98/com.ch1/vinge.singularity.html)

“ Progress in hardware has followed an amazingly steady curve in the last few
decades. Based on this trend, I believe that the creation of greater-than-
human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years. (Charles Platt has
pointed out that AI enthusiasts have been making claims like this for thirty
years. Just so I'm not guilty of a relative-time ambiguity, let me be more
specific: I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.)”

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ggggtez
We still have 10 more years to go then. But honestly I'd argue that we have
already achieved at least some level of "greater than human" intelligence. Not
general intelligence, mind you, but none the less.

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ska
I agree that definition matters. I don't think we are really significantly
closer to AGI than we were 20 years ago, but we've definitely demonstrated
"greater chess intelligence. etc." in particular sorts of constrained domains.

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ajna91
In that very narrow sense that computers are more intelligent than humans
(like Chess-playing), abacuses were also more intelligent than humans
thousands of years ago (mental math).

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holoduke
Off topic but I found the advertisement quite amusing all the way down in the
article. 'ready to run software' :) we got exactly similar ads today from
cloud providers like Amazon.

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alatkins
Does anyone have an alternate link? I'm getting a PR_CONNECT_RESET_ERROR.

