Core ideas that have persisted
😋 🍭 For a few months now I have enjoyed reading the regular (mostly truncated) email I receive from TuringPost and today I took the plunge (see why below) and became a paid subscriber -apparently on founder Ksenia Se's 41st birthday, which comes with a one-day-only 41% discount. I have no vested interest, just saying.
Why did I decide to pay for TuringPost's content? Because it is clever and timely but mostly because it resonates with me. Today's read "When AI meant Ambient Intelligence" 🧠 , is about past visions of a future that has now come.
▶️ From Vannevar Bush's Memex to J.C.R. Licklider's man-computer symbiosis, from Alan Kay's kids tablet at XEROX Parc (it is worth noting that Alan came up with the now famous "the best way to predict the future is to invent it", and what a good predictor he was/is) to AT&T's "You Will" campaign, these visions of the future from the last 70 years may have missed the mark in terms of the "implementation details", but, as Ksenia writes, "What’s striking, in all these retro visions, is how many of the core ideas have persisted. The interfaces changed. The form factors shrank. But the goals – augmenting memory, easing knowledge work, making environments responsive – remain steady."
▶️ In other words, the core logic of the visions, driven by an understanding of human nature and cravings, has endured the test of time. The image below from the post is a 1920s representation of "facetime" the way it could be imagined one century ago.
My own visions 😵💫 , if one may be so bold as to call them that, date only back 25 years or so: among them, a particular kind of human-machine symbiosis where the machine supplies generative diversity and the human supplies judgment, experience and intuition. The "form factor" I envisioned was a bit different from today's dominant paradigm: I thought evolutionary algorithms 🧬 could provide the generative mechanism and the human serve as a "digital breeder", providing guidance to the evolutionary process. Today's version of this vision is not fully formed: yes, genAI is super powerful, but machine-human interfaces do not seem to reflect any deep thoughts about the complementarity of human cognition and AI "computation". Now, there's an opportunity.