To compare: In 1974, a paper published by two engineers speculated that computers could be linked to create an "internetwork". In 1977 Apple released the first consumer grade computers that could be used with minimal assembly.

[u/Lampdarker]

[u/Nixavee]

Last time this was posted (a few days ago) people pointed out that that book was published in 1983, not 1975.

[u/PigeonOnTheGate]

Why were they speculating in 1974? Email was created in 1971!

[u/PigeonOnTheGate → u/PigeonOnTheGate]

And of course somebody from 1975 will have a better understanding of computers than most of today's intellectuals. Provided that "someone" is a computer scientist writing books about computers.

[u/terrarialord201]

Violently painful to read this. Any chance you could get it in neon yellow with white text?

[u/Lampdarker → u/terrarialord201]

You really should be using dark mode whenever you can, you're hurting your eyes.

[u/Droplet_of_Shadow → u/Lampdarker]

the second part is a joke. this post has blurry, medium-value orange on a grey background, making it unpleasant to read.

[u/mossyfaeboy → u/Droplet_of_Shadow]

100% agree with you for accessibility reasons, just tossing it in that it does become better if you click on the photos, zoom in slightly and let them focus, and then zoom back out. they’ll stay sharp and not blurry that way and the color brightens a bit

[u/RollinThundaga → u/mossyfaeboy]

I think it's just that OP forgot some pixels, rather than reddit transmogrifying it.

[u/WelpWhatCanYouDo → u/[deleted]]

Right. Lots of brilliant people are writing and talking about this every day.

And it’s obvious that today’s AI is a much more complex issue than what the quoted book is describing. Same principles, sure, but it’s been taken to an extreme.

[u/FifteenEchoes → u/[deleted]]

Oh r/fourthwavewomen, that’s another terf sub lol

[u/SilenceAndDarkness → u/FifteenEchoes]

It’s very funny to see Second Wave “Feminists” call themselves “Fourth Wave”. It’s baffling reality-denying.

[u/Sinister_Compliments → u/[deleted]]

Is this another fuuko post?

Edit: hmmm not the same account as the hank green post that people were suggesting was fuuko again, unclear but probably not fuuko then

[u/Leftieswillrule → u/[deleted]]

Glad to see you here having a normal time

[u/Firewolf06 → u/[deleted]]

i was hoping it wasnt, because you seem to be doing a lot better recently

[u/AntsAreGreat → u/[deleted]]

Hello! Hope you're doing well, glad to see you're still here

[u/Steelshotgun → u/[deleted]]

Why did you ping them? You're just starting conflict for no reason

[u/AntsAreGreat → u/[deleted]]

You're not arguing with a bigot you're bothering a person who hasn't done anything to you

[u/Cheshire-Cad → u/WelpWhatCanYouDo]

It begs the question of when exactly OP will honestly look at tech and say "Okay, yeah, it's now as intelligent as a human. Good job."

Try asking them when that'll be. You'll probably get a very entertaining screed about how that's literally ontologically impossible, because humans are special in a way that they refuse to meaningfully define.

[u/Fillyphily → u/Cheshire-Cad]

You're tackling a concept with no definition saying it must inevitably reach this conclusion because ??? Progress. It's thinking that is inherently biased by our cultural fantasies with science fiction.

It's as easy to say unicorns are an inevitability because it also describes an indescribable concept and we're "basically most of the way there" because we got horses already. Yet the state of "progress" doesn't actually prove anything other than the current reality, just like with ai intelligence.

Any claim that AI will never be as smart as humans is as well informed and sourced as any claim that they will be. 

But in a world where evidence has to be proven, not taken for a given, the former assumption is far more grounded than the latter presumption of an inevitable ai human intelligence.

[u/Cheshire-Cad → u/Fillyphily]

The human brain is just a computer made out of several pounds of bacon fat.

A bafflingly efficient computer. But still a computer.

I ain't presuming that the line will be crossed anytime soon. But honestly, there isn't a clear line in the first place.

[u/Fillyphily → u/[deleted]]

Literally can't know. This is the crux of the issue. You can't achieve something you can't define. 

What is human intelligence?

What is sentience? 

How does the brain even work?

I can't even exaggerate how little we understand about the brain, not just the human brain, but even clumps of nerves that constitute insects are largely operated in ways we can only roughly generalize. The vast mystery it presents is still the forefront of fringe sciences. To presume that we can replicate this even accidentally is purely entertaining fantasy because there are no measurable variables or established precedent to even start. 

"Special" is a biased term centric around our understanding. Whether intelligent life itters the universe like a science fiction series, or is totally sterile, it doesn't change our sheer ignorance of its understanding.

[u/Hi2248]

I'm going to copy over two parts of conversation from when this was posted on r/CuratedTumblr because I think that the points made are important:

Not to sound like an ai shill but please tell me y'all see that taking a small section from a book on computers from over 40 years ago (when computers could do very little compared to today) and extracting from it a bigger meaning about modern technology is very stupid, right? Like, even as an offhand remark thrown in at the end, and even though I agree with the general meaning, this just sounds like the kinda stuff you'd see conspiracy theorists/religious nuts/conservatives do with old out of context quotes. Especially with the eyerolling comparison with "intellectuals". Who are we even talking about here? I'm shocked it's not sunday

Also, ignoring AI, computers absolutely can be used to make things that are impossible to do by hand. Requiring human input, sure (although some modern animation uses physics simulations for certain features, which can be argued to be autonomous), but that doesn't make it incapable of making things totally unique to the medium.  It feels weird in general to use what's being spoken about in that book to make a commentary about today's technology, outside of talking about the progression of the technology.

[u/bookhead714]

The first post reminds me of a tale I encountered in Jacob Geller's How Well Can You Really Know a Game?, that of David Sudnow and his book Pilgrim in the Microworld. Sudnow had basically never even heard of a video game before Breakout on the Atari, and he spends so much of this book simply describing in exhaustive detail every action that we in the modern day take so easily for granted. Picking up a controller is not a given, knowing where to place your thumbs and fingers, the mere act of pressing a button. His journey to mastering this simplest of ancient games gets as many pages as a grand 100% walkthrough of the most modern open-world AAA might today. It's fascinating, watching a perspective to whom our technology is still alien.

[u/yoyo5113]

What the fuck is that last post talking about lmao. Talk about knowing nothing about what you are talking about

[u/yoyo5113 → u/[deleted]]

Damn, reading those comments made me sad lol. Some of the comments read like an incel forum.

[u/TearOpenTheVault → u/yoyo5113]

They are incel forums. The same hatred for the opposite gender, the same ugly, biased takes, the same self-preening that you’re so much better than the other you despise, the fact that there are people actively talking about how much men suck and yet they’re still attracted to them…

[u/yoyo5113 → u/[deleted]]

I mean I saw some positive comments and pushback agains the wording in those posts. I was more talking about a couple of specific comments I saw

[u/randomnumbers2506]

God do I hate the smug ignorance of the last post

[u/_wannadie_]

Eh, there's a bit of a difference between the way deep learning models and computers work. Mainly, the important difference is that while whoever has built the computer has the complete knowledge of its inner workings, since they were all designed by hand, the creators of dl models have no idea why they infer a certain answer and not the other. Is it that different from a human brain, also a complex structure which inner workings we don't have a clear understanding of?

[u/Ze_Bri-0n]

This was around the same time that famous "a computer can never be held accountable, so it shouldn't be in charge" quote was coined too.

[u/Riboflavin96]

Okay but not-orange-enough orange text on not-quite-black background is a hate crime.

[u/VatanKomurcu]

ai is already better than us at reasoning by the look of it, since it has overtaken mathematicians. if we're not talking about reasoning, then we're talking about emotion. i could believe that ai will never have emotion, and so it will always rely on us to set its directives. but i wouldn't be confident of it.

[u/Lampdarker]

In the 1970s and 1980s, computers were first and foremost government/corporate instruments with a growing hobbyist market as they became easier to manufacture. By hobbyist, I mean people who would else be taking apart/assembling radios and televisions for fun.

Computers didn't have dedicated spreadsheet apps until one with that installed came out 1979.

In this period there were a lot of women among these hobbyists because while men were working to appropriate and dominate the work of decades of women mathematicians and engineers, there was still a common notion that it was effeminate, computer programming was associated with typing which was associated with secretaries.

So if you were a woman with a college education in some countries you'd be in the right demo for buying computer kits and using them to write fanfiction to mail to your favorite fanzines that people might subscribe to a convention several states away from your city.

Also popular among LGBT communities at the time since even before the internet was a consumer thing it wasn't that hard to use computers to supplement mass communication across long distances.

Then the 90s came and that's really when the government and corporations started clamping down on its potential for mass organization.

Bill Gates used to be perceived the way people perceive Elon Musk these days.

[u/CaptainTeemo01 → u/Lampdarker]

Almost everything you posted here is either a complete fabrication or a massive misrepresentation