I would never describe myself as a ‘techie’. In my second year of undergraduate studies (1978) I failed my computer programming course in Fortran Watfor & Watfiv [that was with punch cards and a terminal that sent the batch to Vancouver and returned results in 24 hours] but the professor gave me a pass if I promised to never take a programming course again. I have kept true to my word all of these years.
You could say that I am not one to jump on the next technology craze. I ignored computers through the 1980s and into the 1990s. However in 1994 I saw my first website at the Computer Research Institute of Montreal (CRIM). It was a revelation. For the first time I saw how computers could connect people. During my undergraduate years nobody explained the relevance of computer programs. It was all about making some arcane program work. I could not relate my life to any of these programs. The web made sense to me.
I need to understand why I am learning something or I just tune out. For example, I was sent to French language training in the Summer of 1978. We were given an aptitude test to see how well we were suited for learning a second language [by the way, English is my second language, having spoken only German until I went to school]. There was a section of the test where a number of Kurdish words were presented and we were told to memorize them. I did not bother. As a result I did poorly on the short-term recall part of the test and was put into the ‘slow learners’ section. By the end of the language training of 13 weeks I went from unilingual to fluently bilingual, probably the only person to do so in our cohort. Part of the reason for my success was my motivation — I had a girlfriend who could not speak English ;)
The advent of the web got me into blogging and using social media. Much of the latter has turned into a mess but the ‘fediverse’ is a light in the darkness — meet me on Mastodon. I still believe in the value of connecting people and sensemaking together. The technology always takes the back seat.
Hence, I am taking a very slow approach to AI, GPT, LLM , etc. I just don’t see the inherent value. A few big players have all of the control over a ‘black box’ technology that nobody can see. I am not a Luddite — though the Luddites were awesome IMO — but I cannot jump on the AI bandwagon until I see its value. So far, I only see value accruing to a few multinational technology companies.
More thoughts on AI/GPT/LLM:
Parallel punch cards! I took a FORTRAN programming class in high school, maybe 1979. We had no keypunch and had to color in cards with a sharpie. Once a week we packed our cards on a school bus to go to the one high school that had an IBM Mainframe. We’d get a printout and maybe there was time for a quick fix, but usually it was wait til next week.
I rather liked it, and made CIS my major at Uni in 1981…. And hated it. I changed the year after to Geology. I was a grad student in geology at Arizona State University in 1988 when they got from Apple a set of Mac Plus machines for a lab for students. They saw my little bit of tech experience and offered me a TA running the lab, helping students, but also experimenting. A first project I did was a gravity simulation program written in… MacFORTRAN! Crazy unlikely paths.
https://cogdogblog.com/2003/10/legacy-of/
Yes, crazy!