> In the anticipated symbiotic partnership, men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking.
This is how people that knew what are doing were using them, but the generalization of computing didn't include generalization of this knowledge so the side effects have been the opposite of this kind of symbiosis. We are condemned to do the drudgery to fulfill goals set by algorithms.
The author posits a time window for this symbiosis, maybe the time is up.
None of those goals are set by algorithms. They're all in heuristics. All machine learning is heuristic. You never know for sure. If the goal were set by an algorithm that would therefore mean it was airtight. That would be like religion or torture, or both. Walking in the footsteps of Jesus.
Despite not actually being algorithms, but heuristics, the demand for those heuristics is insatiable. And it's verifiable, if you eg send two factor matrices here for me to create the product and send it back, you can check a statistically overwhelming amount of them with a laptop in a second.
Licklider is one the main persons behind the ARPANET. The Imagineers of War by Sharon Weinberger has a lot of context on his time in DARPA. Few things that I found particularly notable:
* Licklider was conscious about not having too much funding compared to other DARPA projects so that in case of a budget cut, there would a more obvious candidates for the slash.
* Initially, universities pushed back on ARPANET because they were afraid that remote access might lead to more candidates for their mainframe time
The version published by Stripe Press is beautiful, but the font is very small. I bought the Stripe Press version and 30 minutes into it I went looking for a digital version to read on my Kindle where I could choose my own font.
Agree on the density, also initially I had that cool holographic cover facing out the open side of my bookshelf to the living room until one night a passing headlight beamed across it in the dark and I realized how absolutely incredibly creepy it was to have Lick as sudden posthumous voyeur...
On the idea and content, it reveals to me there was a great shadow world of ideas in those early days I think are still being "rediscovered" in the current time. We did an awful job of following through on visionaries like him, hell even Grace Hopper's simple 1955 paper on compiler thru compiler compilers didnt make a comeback until the shadows of the 70's, then 90's, and the past decade.
We imagined the world in the 50s. We invented it in the 60s. And then we entered a profit-driven dark age that is barely letting those results trickle into everyday reality. The future of computing is so far from what we conceptualize today we still don't even have the vocabulary for it. Conceptually this essay lays it out.
Try synthesizing a toy program in Idris2 with a lsp server and querying the compiler about what you are writing as you explore. It will open your eyes that we have just hit this reality. Don't be fooled by copilot, its the cheap plastic copy of real intelligence working with computers alternating their best strengths.
This is how people that knew what are doing were using them, but the generalization of computing didn't include generalization of this knowledge so the side effects have been the opposite of this kind of symbiosis. We are condemned to do the drudgery to fulfill goals set by algorithms.
The author posits a time window for this symbiosis, maybe the time is up.