Everything we do in life concerns knowledge. Some understanding of the subject is required to accomppish anything with it.
If we broaden this outlook we see that in essence life is about knowledge! When you know something well you can excel at it. Also you are less likely to become effect of it.
I’ve been wanting to write something on this topic for quite a while now. Artificial Intelligence or AI as it is known was initially made popular by Alan Turing last century.
It then seemed to die down in popularity and recently has made a come back.
I am interested in writing about it because I believe it is filled with a number of myths and misunderstandings. To fully explain what I am talking about I am going to have to delve into some very basic human questions. I am going to have to go where modern day science as kept away from in droves for whatever reason. This sound controversial? Well it is! You see when we talk about artificial intelligence we need to get our terms defined first. (Oh and here’s another one, defining terms. Isn’t that obvious? Define ones terms or get them defined? No it’s not! Quick test: What is the definition of Computer? Do you know the definition right away? No? You need to look it up!)
We hear a lot about innovation in the software industry these days. It is sold as the ultimate thing to aim for in any software endeavor.
I was looking at this the other day and it seemed like there was something missing there.
Lets look at really successful technology companies.
One often hears the remark “Well Science has proven that…”. This has always sounded very strange to me. Is Science a living thing? How can it prove something if it’s not living? Science without a living being is as dead as any piece of matter. So that’s why this statement is strange, it gives people the idea that Science is some kind of living thing, a kind of inexorable dictator that says it as it is. Well that is not the case.
Well I’m cruising 36,000 feet above the Atlantic cramped in economy class with better things to do. I came across this article in CIO about developers and what they get up to.
The gist of the story is that developers usually have their own agenda which is at variance with the employer’s interests. I looked back on my experiences in this line and saw many occurrences of this.
One lesson I have learned through the years, and have needed to re-learn at some points is a lesson that I feel could change the face of innovation in the software industry.
Unfortunately schooling these days teaches a pupil to depend on authority, to depend on other peoples evaluations and ideas. These ‘other’ people are supposed to be ‘authorities’. They are supposed to be the ones to follow etcetera. They look, observe and evaluate and then tell us what we need to do! So what they sell is second hand observation and even riskier second hand evaluation of data.
Have you ever wondered what it is that slows software projects? What is it that makes some projects miss their deadlines and others succeed?
What is the key item that puts spanners in the works on some development endeavours? Surely there is something, that if we handle can prevent these key failures in the software industry.
I started my first computer job in 1985, July to be exact. Just after completing what was called “National Service”.
Lucky for me I got a good amount of computer experience doing my National Service. I learned RTL2, RSX 11M the PDP Operating System, and got to do some numerical optimisation algorithms that were tested in real life!
In my first actual job in 1985 we did real time programming on Digital Equipment Corporation VAX computers.
I liked these machines vax780, they had 32 bit address space, so no fiddling with selectors or active page registers.
However compared to today they were highly primitive. My Apple watch has more memory than those VAX machines, and who knows maybe more processing power!