I went to a library book sale this weekend and I found a very old book called âElectronic Life: How to Think About Computers,â which was published in I think 1975? Iâve been reading it kind of like how I would read a historical document, and itâs lowkey fascinating
Thereâs a whole paragraph thatâs like âokay, find the keyboard. Donât panic if it has more keys than a typewriter, thatâs normal. Really, itâs fine. The extra keys donât make things harder. Itâs FINEâ
Thought this section was particularly interesting:
Can the computer create something? At first glance it seems obvious that it can. Animated computer graphics, with their fluid transitions and whiplash perspectives, look strikingly new. And if one watches the machine doing animation work, there seem to be lengthy periods when the computer is acting âon its own.â
But if one observes these processes in more detail, it becomes clear that creation is not occurring within the machine. First of all, computer graphics are not unique. Computers have yet to generate anything that cannot be done by handâand usually already has been done. Second, the apparent ability of the computer to âact on its ownâ is the outcome of thousands of hours of patient human effort to refine its instructions. The computer can manipulate a shape for us if we have already informed it what a shape is, what the rules for shape manipulation are, what this specific shape is, and so forth.
You can start an automobile engine and it will run by itself, too, but that doesnât mean itâs being creative. Itâs just running.
Somebody in 1975 had a better understanding of why artificial intelligence is not in any way âintelligenceâ than the majority of todayâs intellectual minds.
