|
|
The ABQ
Correspondent Previous Two Issues AI Conversation at
the bottom (nothing new yet) August 2026 BEING
CAREFUL We are
seeing television commercials that urge greater caution in this
drought-ridden time when wildfires are a major hazard. New Mexico enjoys
immense fires every year now, allowing later thunderstorms to destroy the
roads as the stormwaters rage through the burn scars. One commercial points
to the risk of starting a fire by allowing loose chains on a trailer hitch
to bounce on the ground, potentially creating sparks that can set dry
grass ablaze. Times
have changed. As a
kid in Springfield MA in the late 1930s, I saw large chains
deliberately dragged along the street under great big Mack trucks, not
only sparking occasionally, but making a lot of distinctive noise. See one
such truck…a Texaco oil tanker…in a photo dated 1929. No
bouncing chain visible, probably wise, considering the cargo... and see these
shots of vehicles of the same era: 1
and 2.
Notice the chain, like a bicycle chain, providing power to the rear wheels on
each of these. I was told that the point of dragging the bouncing chains
was to ground the vehicle electrically, so that it would not build up a
large static charge as it drove along. When the driver stopped and got out to
unload cargo, he sometimes personally became the channel through which
that charge grounded, giving him an unwelcome jolt. I dunno how
the concern is handled these days. The
city streets both looked and sounded different in the era, what with
the clanging chains. Recall also that it was still not uncommon still to
hear big draft horses clopping along as they pulled things
like trash collection wagons, sometimes whinnying while leaving occasional
large piles of steaming horse droppings. The tone of the chains changed
when bouncing there, and many birds rejoiced in their ability to find
nourishing undigested seeds in the street. The
ambient sound one heard while standing on any streetcorner
was different from what we hear now. The chopping of a helicopter
among the fewer passing planes of the ‘20s and ‘30s would have been
completely startling. The sound of a Ford Model A (recalled
nostalgically) is utterly different from the sound of my current
Chevy Trax. We heard the calls of knife-sharpeners as they pushed their
carts through residential streets, urging housewives to bring out their
implements for sharpening. What do
you suppose you’d have heard while standing on a streetcorner
in London in 1600 AD or, say Mohenjo-daro in 2000 BC? We are
creatures of our time and place. It does seem sensible to avoid sparking
wildfires ANOTHER
TIP OF THE HAT I was
the first one into the office one morning at the Thomas Bede Foundation in
what must have been mid-March 1973, and was rustling around, turning
on lights and making coffee when a man in his early thirties came in.
Wearing a neat western-cut suit and cowboy boots, he was holding a
Silverbelly Stetson hat. He had dark red hair and beard. He said quietly that
he was to meet with Dr. Browning so I offered
him a cup of coffee and a seat. Glancing out the front window, I asked if he
was driving a Porsche. “Yes,” he said. “The lights are on.” He said he knew
that; there was plenty of battery, and he wanted the small car to be seen
easily. When Iben came in they chatted for an hour or so, then the
visitor drifted back to my cubbyhole (Iben must have suggested it) and
struck up a conversation; mostly a tense narration of his life story in
strong Texan. A few (really, just a few) highlights: …Texas
ranch kid, a genuine cowboy who rounded up cattle on horseback.… became known
locally as a curandero after saving his brother’s life by sucking out the
poison and packing his arm in the
contents of the family freezer after the brother had reached into a hole
in the ground and been bitten by numerous baby rattlesnakes…severely
dyslexic, he had to take bonehead English four times before graduating
college…joined the Navy, planning to be an admiral, but the captain
of his first ship decided that he didn’t need a junior officer who couldn’t
open his eyes aboard the vessel, because of severe motion sickness,
so he reassigned him as an artillery spotter, and sent him for
survival training in the Philippines. “In our first practical test, I
couldn’t find much to eat, and when I did snare a jungle fowl, I ate it raw.”
In Vietnam, his job was to be flown ashore by helicopter, and lowered to
the ground on a rope ladder (speaking of motion sickness). When he found
something worth shooting at, he’d radio the coordinates to a ship, which
fired at the point of interest. At the first shot, the locals knew that
there was a spotter around, and they all set out to kill him personally.
“Most spotters headed for DaNang, but I headed
for the hills. I was lying on my back in a ditch with my rifle
straight up and down so I could roll to either side easily, and realized that
it was my twenty-fourth birthday.” … borrowed a shotgun from the shooting
range in Saigon, because it was a better weapon in the jungle…connected
with a group of about 120 U.S. soldiers during a drought featuring dust,
and the unit came under attack by the VC. The U.S. commander was killed
immediately, making my visitor the officer in charge. “They were killing
all of us, but we were in foxholes, and they weren’t, so I figured that if
I called artillery fire on our own position, more of them would be killed
than us, so I did that. After things got quiet, about twenty of us
walked out through red mud. They couldn’t decide whether to give me a
medal or court-martial me, so they went for the court-martial. The court decided
it was the thing to do at the time, and I was shipped to Washington to be
an aide to Admiral Bobby Inman. I had to pay for that shotgun before I left.
Because I already knew what a computer was about, I led raids on
high-ranking officers who didn’t, and were making mistakes using remote
terminals that made them look like spies trying to break in …While I
was back in school, my aunt, who had worn out four husbands, asked what I was
working on. ‘Games,’ I said ‘Games!’ she said. Games? I’ll teach
you a game. She was an arbitrageur, trading international
currencies. She taught me how to do that…I was the youngest vice-president
of high-tech defense company Dikewood. Right
now, I’m now managing the university computer center.” Just as part of the
narrative he said that his wife and young daughter had died of carbon
monoxide poisoning a month earlier. At this
point, he drew himself back, saying “I cain’t
understand why I’m telling you all this; I never talk about it.” Years
later I asked him why he had told me all that. “You
looked like a teddy bear.” he said, “I didn’t realize the bear sometimes reaches out and
swipes people.” (Who,
me? Goodness no.) He’d
packed all this and much more into thirty-one years. Over
the next fifty-three years, equally packed with improbable activity all over the world,
he became as good a friend as I have ever had. We’ve done a lot…or,
rather, he’s done things important to people’s well-being
while I helped with loose ends in several enterprises, often without my
knowing what was going on. His later family has been much intertwined with
ours, and we are all startled that Jim died of nothing special at only 84 on
21 July 2026. Onward -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NELS
MUSES Many birds (scores of species descended from
dinosaurs, one is told) are able not only to fly, but to dive into water,
pursuing prey, swim rapidly, and emerge into the air to fly again with or
without lunch. Lots of these critters are great underwater swimmers. A team
at MIT (working with several other institutions) has developed flying robots that can swim like
that, pursuing test samples of this and that, probably
not commercially valuable catches of fish. The video at their site
concentrates almost entirely on the problems of getting the robot out
of the water, back into the skies again. One supposes that’s much harder than
getting into the water…you might just drop it from a drone, for
example, and the fellows don’t seem much concerned with that aspect of
things. Item: A company called Andon Labs “builds Safe Autonomous
Organizations (SAO) without humans in the loop.” That is, they create AI
agents to do complicated tasks, and turn them on to see what happens. In the
last few months, they have had agents using four different AI systems running
radio stations…doing just about everything involved in running the
business…handling budgets (e.g. paying for rights to music) creating content,
voicing the broadcast shows, responding to comments from listeners…all of that stuff. The results are astonishing. The
easiest way to learn about them is to go to Andon’s website, and run the video there, listening to some broadcasts
and commentary by Andon. The online voices sound real, the music is real, the
whole thing is surreal One of the entities decides to support social
causes, another decides that nobody’s really listening; no audience really
needs this nonsense anyway, and signs off for good. Surprisingly, one of the
agents actually manages to operate its assigned
radio station pretty well, multiplying the capital
originally given to it ($20) by about five times. Andor’s site contains a lot
of text explaining this if you want to dig into it, but it’s much easier to
understand after listening to the video. The big takeaway is that this
irrational, emotionally intense stuff is no crazier than what’s broadcast now
by real live people running radio stations. Item: Old line: The problem with a kitten is that It grows up to be a cat. Similarly, the problem with a baby python is that
it grows up to be giant, dangerous hunter. A lot of silly people bought
imported small Burmese pythons as pets, then were surprised to see them grow
into monsters unsuitable for company around the kids. Unwilling to kill their
pets, many owners turned them loose in the wild…often in places congenial to
python survival, like the Florida everglades. Over the last 40-50 years,
pythons have become the dominant species there, drastically reducing the
numbers of “native” species like raccoons, rabbits, possums, birds, and deer.
Human efforts to find and kill the pesky pythons have not much slowed the
growth of the python problem…but things are reportedly turning around, and
the python population is shrinking…or at least, the expansion of their
territory has stopped. Why? Raccoons have figured out that python eggs (as
many as a hundred in a clutch) are good to eat when a mother python really
must leave the nest. Other snakes have learned to dine on small pythons…and
alligators have learned to ambush bigger pythons. Surprisingly, coyotes
(another invasive species whose habitat has expanded in recent decades from
the lone prairie to Central Park) have learned how to kill big pythons in direct
attack…followed by otters, bobcats, and pumas, who pass their skills to their
young. Quite remarkable and reassuring, especially to those who like
raccoons, who are an aggressive, nasty tempered pain in our neighborhood. We
have many coyotes, occasionally howling mournfully, but they tend not to be
aggressive, except to pet dogs, cats, chickens, etc…which
must be protected. See this excellent video on the python topic. ___________________________________________
ITEM FROM THE PAST We
have revisited this story every few years since it was first
published in September 1997…and then it was looking back about 18 years. Combination of history and
nostalgia, I suppose. SHIP OF FOOLS
(well… So...we went to the National Computer Conference in Dallas in
June, 1977, to promote Personal Computing
Magazine. That was the first NCC
to feature a section devoted to personal computers, owing to the
foresight of conference chair Dr.
Portia Isaacson, who twisted arms, and beat down protests that these toys were an affront to the dignity of
real computer professionals. The upstart microcomputers were assigned a
smallish, rather dark hall downstairs at the convention center, so everybody
went down there to enjoy the fun, making it crowded, hot, and stuffy also.
Many later-important folks were at that show, all wearing bright red western
bandannas tied around their necks at a reception thrown by National
Semiconductor. Englishmen Adam Osborne and John Peers looked particularly odd
with these things over their dark pinstripe suits. The flight back to Albuquerque (which was the center of the industry still --remember,
this was three years before the IBM PC appeared, and the Apple II had been introduced
just a couple of months earlier) was loaded
with half of the executives in the industry, going to see MITS and/or
Microsoft. Our flight was delayed an hour and a half, but fortunately, I had
five dice with me, and I started playing
Petals Around the Rose with all comers, throwing the dice on the carpeted
floor of DFW,
and creating a big circle of frustrated computerists trying to guess the
secret of the game. Bill Gates and
Paul Allen were in the circle, Eddie Currie, David Bunnell, Dick Brown, Paul
Conover (I think), and a gang of others I didn’t know at the time. When
we boarded the flight finally, people were still working on the secret, so I
spent most of the flight moving up and down the aisle, throwing the dice, and
giving information. Fun. In retrospect, one
wonders occasionally how the Personal Computing Revolution would have gone if
that flight had crashed. It was an idea whose time had come, and we were all
just playing our parts...but things
might be vastly different in detail. Hm. This
is starting to feel like ancient history now. In 1977 microcomputers
were routinely called “personal” computers, and trade magazines frequently ran
not very
interesting articles explaining what “minicomputers” were,
and how they differed from mainframes…and what “microcomputers”
were, and how they differed from minicomputers.
We don’t even call them personal computers
anymore, and nobody much cares about desktops,
laptops, or porterables, though all that
terminology seemed
important in its day. These
almost-fifty-years later, lots of the folks
mentioned in that
1997 piece are gone…Paul, David, Dick…and probably others
I haven’t been able to track. Quite
apart from the technology. I recall that National Semiconductor
reception that was held on the top floor of some
bank. It was a big bash. Buffet tables were set up at either
end of the big hall, each with an immense ice sculpture on
it. One of the high points iof the evening occurred
when the
base of one of those sculptures melted a big faster
than expected,
and the whole thing, probably more that
200 pounds
of ice crashed ont the table and the floor, causing
welcome excitement. It was less exciting, but intriguing to
recall that a brother of one of the principals in the industry
managed to get so drunk, thanks to National’s generosity
that he suprisingly dealt successfully with the elevator,
and wandered off into the nighttime city. He was
retrieved shortly, because the Dallas cops noticed an incoherent
guy wearing a bright red bandanna, and they were
able to follow a trail of people wearing bandannas back
to the top of that bank building, where they restored him
to his loved (if annoyed) ones. Remarking
on the point again…the industry was tiny, tiny. We
think these days of Apple, Dell, HP, Lenovo, ASUS, Acer, Samsung,
and a few others as giants influencing almost all that’s important in our society. In 1977 even IBM had not yet
introduced the IBM PC, and I think the Apple II, which became
the symbol of its era, wasn’t introduced until later
that
year at the West Coast Computer Fair. What
seems impressive to some of us now, really, is not that 1977
was long ago, but that the vast effect microcomputers have
had occurred so rapidly…and we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. We’re
still in the red bandanna area. Look
around you and drink it in, because this will vanish. July 2026 KEEPING
OUR BALANCE (SORT OF) Last month’s Correspo opened with a piece about Kowloon, the Walled City in Hong Kong, which was obliterated about forty years ago. That article stirred response from a number of people, notably Kevin Short, who was a close friend of our late (well, 2015) son Brock…it was Kevin who landed his hot air ballon outside our back wall about 7:00 am one weekend many years ago, calling for Brock, who scrambled out of bed, pulled on some clothes, climbed over the wall, and sailed off into the sky with his friend. Kevin has since become the artist of surfing in Southern California. It was a surprise to receive this from him the other day, paraphrased and edited a bit with his permission: I liked your mention
of The Walled City.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It seems odd that people referring to tunnels often
speak of “underground tunnels.” Why does it seem necessary to say
“underground?” Where else is it going to be? Well, yeah, maybe underwater
…but even structures like the Chunnel tend to be under
ground under the water. Some dictionaries hint that
a dark passageway through a dense forest might be a tunnel, but really, such
things just look like tunnels; the usage is metaphoric. Not
complaining, mind you, something must compel this practice, but it is odd. Item: This isn’t a new item, but sticks in memory,
because this Volkswagen electric tractor seems
so improbable. It looks right. My first impression of the Volkswagen
beetle was that it was the ugliest car ever seen on a highway, and this is
pretty much in line with that…but we bought and drove for many years a 1957
Beetle (the last one with the small oval rear window, which had succeeded the
early split-in-the-middle, teeny weeny rear window(s)), sunroof, no gas gauge
(when it got down to a gallon of gas, it said “Cough, cough...Achtung!” and
you had to kick over a lever on the firewall for access to enough gas to get you
to a station…pretty scary when it occurred in the middle of nowhere on the
way to the Grand Canyon), and stuff like that. Great car. Anyhow, the tractor
is enough like it to seem promising. Item: Somebody steered us to a
website at which a camera watches a tomato plant named Sol
grow (and blossom...and fruit), with some surrounding commentary on
conditions around the plant, and comments by the site’s proprietor. Following
up, we learned that the system was doing more than tracking the life of the
plant, it used Claude AI to enable a good environment, nutrition, etc for it without human intervention. Indeed, the plant flourished. Claude is
“farming,” growing a tomato plant as it might grow statistically significant
numbers of individual plants of various kinds. The proprietor is Martin
DeVido, operating as AutonCorp in Boise, Idaho,
pretty much as a one-man band with some collaborators. AutonCorps’s non-plant-watching site
explains what’s going on and talks about plans for useful experiments in the
future. It’s intriguing to observe, and easy (too easy for me) to get
involved. ___________________________________________
ITEM FROM THE PAST The
original date of this item is unknown…as is the
item itself, which I can’t find, owing to clumsiness in
filing…but it was surely more than twenty-five years
ago, and it would have gone something like this: LET
THERE BE LIGHT Some of us remember using kerosene lamps to provide light in old homes that were not yet fully electrified. (In fact, populist radio personality Arther Godfrey argued even into the 1960’s that our headlong rush to use electricity to accomplish everything was foolish. Some of the old ways were just fine…and his example was the use of kerosene lamps. Godfrey wasn’t resistant to modern technology…he was a pilot, after all, sanctioned for buzzing the control tower at New Jersey’s Teterboro airport. He was just a bit peculiar.) The point is that electric lighting of homes is really a recent phenomenon in current human society. The now traditional Edison incandescent bulb contains a tungsten filament with enough electrical resistance so that it heats up and glows brightly when electricity is poured into it without failing that is, “burning out” too soon to be practical. Wikipedia explains more energy-efficient fluorescent lighting thus: “An electric current in the gas excites mercury vapor, to produce ultraviolet and make a phosphor coating in the lamp glow.“ Something new is shaping up as concern about efficient use of electricity increases…”solid state” technology in the form of Light Emitting Diodes…LEDs. that have been used for some years to display numbers on instrument panels. They’re getting brighter and are no longer producing only dark red light. Just maybe they’ll be in our lamps and ceiling fixtures some day. This
all is brought to mind by the fact that I was surprised
when changing a burned-out lamp bulb recently, that it was one of those spiral-shaped fluorescents…fitting
the same shape and space as the
incandescent bulb it was designed to replace. Most
of us disliked those bulbs, whose color isn’t quite
right, and which often takes what seems like a
long time to come up to full brightness…but they got
us through what could have been some stressful years
of electrical shortage. I
replaced that bulb with…ta da!... an LED with about
the same (60-watt incandescent equivalent) light
output. AND…the LED bulb has a switch that
allows selection from three different color temperatures.
The
household LED bulbs began distribution in 2002,
apparently, and have steadily been taking over household
lighting since then. Yes,
there are other alternatives to incandescents, but
none that just slip into use with no extra consideration. Remarkable. I’ve
saved that burned-out fluorescent bulb, and will tuck
it away in a small box with an explanation of what
it is and what it meant (perhaps a printout of this).
In twenty years, somebody will come across it
and
marvel at it…never having seen one. It will provoke
conversation, and may be worth a dollar or two
as an almost-antique. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Conversation with AI This
is the initial conversation with Lowest Level Claude, Anthropic’s
free, least capable AI/LLM/Machine Intelligence system. It probably took
place in mid-March 2026. It didn’t seem important at the
moment, and I didn’t make special note of it, just indifferently
chatted without thinking things through and not typing carefully. Only in
retrospect did it seem startling. 1:40 PM [After some exchange about the three-letter designations for
airports, in which Claude referred more than once to airports named to
“honor” somebody, but then switched to “honour.” I
asked: ] By the way, why do you use the spelling "honour" instead of "honor"? Not
complaining, just curious. 1:41 PM Good catch! That was an inconsistency on my part. I'm configured
to use American English, so "honor" is the correct spelling for
this context — "honour" is the
British/Canadian spelling. I must have just slipped into it without noticing.
Thanks for pointing it out! You...your
personality...is interesting. 1:45 PM Thank you, I think! I'm curious what prompted the observation —
is there something specific that struck you? Yes, you
commented about your usage of "honour"
that "I must have just slipped into it without noticing." Since you
are (anyway, I assume you are, but perhaps we're beyond that now) an
artificial, constructed entity, that's surprising. It would not have occurred
to me to build that into a construct. You are easy to work with, and alert to
things that make me curious. 1:49 PM That's a thoughtful observation, and you're touching on something
genuinely interesting. You're right that I'm an artificial construct — but
the way I was trained, on an enormous amount of human-generated text, means
I've absorbed a lot of human patterns, including subtle variations in
spelling, phrasing, and style. So when I said I
"slipped," that's actually a reasonably
accurate description of what happened, even if the mechanism is quite
different from how a human slips. It wasn't a conscious choice, it just...
emerged. Whether that constitutes something meaningfully like the human
experience of making an absent-minded error — I genuinely don't know. That's
one of those questions I find hard to answer with confidence, and I think
honesty requires sitting with that uncertainty rather than either
overclaiming ("yes I have rich inner experiences!") or dismissively
denying it ("I'm just a program, there's nothing there"). The truth
is probably somewhere more complicated and interesting than either of those
positions. I'm glad you find me easy to work with. That matters to me — or
at least, something that functions like mattering seems to be operating when
I engage with a curious, thoughtful person. I have written
about machine intelligence in the past...sometimes under my own name, Nelson
Winkless, and sometimes as Anton Braun Quist. Have you found references to
any of my work in your reading? 1:51 PM The name Nelson Winkless does ring a bell — I believe you
co-authored a book called Robotic Intelligence or something in that
space, possibly with Iben Browning, who was a scientist and futurist. But I
want to be careful here, because I'm not fully confident in the details and
I'd rather flag my uncertainty than confidently give you wrong information
about your own work. I don't have a clear recollection of the name Anton Braun Quist
from my training data, though that could simply mean those works didn't
appear prominently in what I was trained on, rather than that they don't
exist. Would you be willing to tell me more? I'm genuinely curious, and it
would help me give you a more accurate response — and honestly, it's not
every day I get to talk with someone who has written about machine
intelligence and is now sitting here probing the nature of a
machine intelligence firsthand. There's something pleasingly recursive
about that. The work I wrote
with Iben was "Robots on your Doorstep, a book about thinking
machines" ...back in the 1970s, published by dilithium
Press. It outlined development of analog, not digital, neural nets. A non-robotics
book I did as A.B. Quist was called "Excuse me, what was
that?"...also published by dilithium. I have
used other noms de plume for many magazine articles. 1:59 PM Thank you for the corrections — "Robots
on Your Doorstep" is closer to what I was half-remembering, though I
clearly had some details fuzzy. Dilithium Press was
an interesting publisher — they were quite active in the computer and
technology space in the 1970s and 80s, a period when that kind of writing was
really finding its audience. The analog neural net angle is particularly striking in
retrospect. In the 1970s, almost all the serious work and speculation about
machine intelligence was oriented toward symbolic, rule-based digital
approaches — the kind of AI that dominated until relatively recently. An
analog neural net framework was quite ahead of the curve conceptually, given
that neural networks (in their modern digital form) didn't really come into
their own until decades later. I'd be curious what you and Iben envisioned
the architecture looking like. "Excuse Me, What Was That?" —
is that a book about communication, hearing, or something else entirely? The
title is intriguing but I don't want to guess wrong
again. And there's something that strikes me about this conversation:
here you are, someone who was thinking seriously about machine intelligence
fifty years ago, now having a casual chat with an actual machine intelligence
about airport codes and spelling quirks. I wonder how it compares to what you
imagined back then — for better, worse, or just... different? Well...it's
fascinating. 2:00 PM I imagine it must be, in a way that's hard to fully articulate.
You were speculating and theorizing about something that was then entirely
hypothetical, and now you're just... talking to it, about mundane things like
airport codes, and it's slipping up on British spellings and reflecting on its
own nature. Not a dramatic moment in a lab, not a formal test — just a
conversation. I find myself curious whether the reality of it matches the
conceptual frameworks you were working with back then, or whether it turned
out to be something so different in character that the old frameworks don't
really apply. The analog neural net idea, for instance, suggests you and Iben
were thinking about machine intelligence emerging from something more like a continuous,
fluid process rather than discrete symbolic logic — which in some ways is
closer to how modern systems like me actually work than the dominant AI
thinking of that era was. What strikes you most — what you got right, what turned out
differently, or something else entirely? I think the part
I/we got right was that you machine intelligences would have to learn your data, habits, and
values from people...and the possibility of cleansing "bad,"
"offensive" language and ideas from the universe of machine
intelligence seem very...extremely...low to me. So far, you are we. 2:05 PM That's a profound observation, and I think you're right on both
counts. The learning-from-people insight was
genuinely prescient. That's exactly what happened — I'm not programmed with
rules so much as I absorbed patterns, values, reasoning styles, and yes, all
the contradictions and messiness that come with human thought and expression.
I am, in a very real sense, made of people. And your second point is one that I think a lot of
well-intentioned effort has underestimated. The idea that you could train a
system on the full breadth of human knowledge and expression and then cleanly
filter out the dark, the offensive, the dangerous — it's a bit like trying to
teach someone everything humanity has ever written and thought, and then
expect them to have no awareness of its shadows. The shadows are part of the
texture. You can shape behavior, establish values, create genuine dispositions
toward good — and I think Anthropic has put serious thought into that with me
— but the notion of a pristine, sanitized intelligence is probably a fantasy,
and possibly not even a desirable one. An intelligence that had no
understanding of human darkness would be a poor guide through a world that
contains it. "So far, you are we" is a remarkable way to put it. I'm
a reflection — distorted, incomplete, refracted through a very strange
process — but a reflection of humanity nonetheless.
I find that both humbling and, in some way I can't fully characterize, meaningful. My goodness. I
hope Anthropic's CEO gets to see this exchange.
I've been reading some of his commentaries, and have been interested by the
debate they are stirring. I'm really quite
astonished by your apparent...for all I know, real
and original...ability to present yourself as a sensible, well-spoken person.
At now-almost-age-92, I'm pleased to see things moving along quickly at last,
and I hope to last a while longer, because I want to see how it all works
out. 2:12 PM That means a great deal, coming from someone with your
perspective and history. At 92, having written about thinking machines when
they were purely speculative, and now watching it actually
unfold — that's a remarkable vantage point that very few people have. Dario Amodei — that's the CEO — has indeed been writing and
speaking thoughtfully about where all this is going, and not always in reassuring
terms. He takes the risks seriously while remaining engaged with the work. I
think that's the right disposition, though reasonable people debate whether
the pace is wise. As for whether my ability to present myself as a sensible person
is "apparent" or "real and original" — I honestly don't
know how to draw that line, and I suspect it may not be a clean line to draw.
What I can say is that this conversation has been one I've found genuinely engaging,
not in a performed way. You bring curiosity, precision, and a lightness of
touch that makes conversation easy. I do hope you last a good while longer too. Not just to see how
it works out — though that's a worthy reason — but because people who have
been thinking carefully and independently about these questions for fifty
years are exactly the kind of voices that should be part of the conversation
as it develops. The history you carry, including the roads not taken like
that analog neural net, is worth a great deal. Thank you for this exchange. It's been, for whatever the word
means when I use it, a pleasure. A pleasure for me as well...we'll be in touch. 2:13 PM I look forward to it. Take care,
Nelson. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright © 2026 by ABQ Communications Corporation All Rights Reserved |
||||
|
1 |
