I‘ve always been puzzled by this thought: Was I born 50 years too early or 50 years too late? This thought resurfaced this week as I rode the train back and forth to Chicago while the rest of the world dazzled itself with remembering the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11.
It reminds me of a skit I once did as Cubmaster for Peter’s pack. We had our meetings in the cavernous Mendon Firehall. It was always filled to capacity. Filled with boys, their parents, and their siblings.
That night I donned a pair of Buzz Lightyear “wings” (actually they were my young nephew’s and I don’t know how I fit them over my shoulders without overstretching them). After strutting a few steps with those wings, I added a Woody hat on top of my head.
Maybe one of the Toy Story movies was out that year.
In either case, I asked the pack to guess who I was. Some of the boys says “Buzz” and some said “Woody.” I said “Nope” to each guess. Then I looked up to the parents in Pack 105 and said – in a distinct John Wayne kind of voice – “Well, pilgrim, some people call me a ‘The Space Cowboy.’”
And so it has been in my life. Teetering on the precipice of “born too early” while simultaneously straddling the ledge of “born too late.” Some might view this as a Continue Reading “Was This Written 50 Years Too Early or 50 Years Too Late?”
My Life With AI—Part II: The Search For The Holy Grail
I always had a certain curiosity (there’s that word again) with the idea of artificial intelligence. You can’t blame science fiction for this. It was simply the challenge. Artificial intelligence represents the Holy Grail of mathematics. It’s not simply ramming a bunch of formulas through faster and faster processors. It’s going a step beyond. It’s giving the computer a basic set of instructions, then allowing it to begin programming itself by building on top of that foundation.
Naturally, I monitored the subject. This is one reason I knew about the Boston-based investment adviser BatteryMarch, although, technically, it wasn’t artificial intelligence; it was just another example of brute force processing. For the inside dope on AI, I didn’t rely on the Wall Street Journal or even the data processing trade press. No, I paid attention to Continue Reading “My Life With AI—Part II: The Search For The Holy Grail”