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The ABQ
Correspondent Previous Two Issues AI Conversation at
the bottom June 2026 PERSISTENCE It’s
almost thirty years
since the UK’s 99-year lease on Hong Kong and the New Territories
ended, and the area passed back into Chinese control in 1997. (England
had seized the area from China in the Opium Wars of the mid-1800s in their
largely successful effort to addict many people to opium in China, creating a
market for that product being produced by British India) An anomalous area
within the New Territories known as Kowloon Walled City…6.4 acres (probably
not more area than I can see in the fairway and green of the 16th
hole of the golf course just beyond my back wall*) that were probably the
most densely populated acres in the world…with a low estimate of
33,000 people and higher estimates ranging up to 50,000. (See the excellent
video here.) Kowloon started as a
small British military base in 1840, but grew in size
and importance, becoming fully walled after a few years. The walls
remained until the Japanese occupation during WWII, when they became
material for other construction. Kowloon was an anomaly, because it wasn’t
really specifically accounted for in agreements
between Britain and China, and it gradually turned into a sort of
no-man’s-land. Its hands full with other matters like poverty and induced
opium addiction, China didn’t want the hassle of enforcing its
jurisdiction. They took a long view, knowing that the Brits would be
leaving in a few decades/years. The Brits didn’t want to mess with it,
also knowing their tenure would end soon…but mostly because it was useful.
All of the “fringe” activities that society
needs, but disapproves of flourished in Kowloon Walled City.
Refugees went there, finding places to survive among the narrow passageways
surrounded by 14-story buildings (The authorities did enforce a limit on the
height of those buildings next to the airport flight path.) With virtually
no formal government, no law enforcement, no building codes, and
frighteningly little fire protection, the place did function, under
both tacit rules and those enforced by the triads. Unhealthy and dangerous Kowloon
thrived. A few years before the end of the lease, the UK and China
agreed to remove Kowloon Walled City as a physical entity…and they did that
with dispatch, leaving only a small park and some memories. Remarkable. Only a
couple of things remotely like it come to mind, the creation of the
Mexican resort city of Cancun in a mostly undeveloped area about fifty years
ago…the government realized that a big support force would be required, and
those people would likely be disaffected by seeing the insane level of luxury
(e.g hot and
cold running water, refrigerators, etc…), so they made
sure that a company town with a scaled-down version of those amenities was
available for the workers. That was effective, but, a zillion other
people were attracted to that high life, creating a huge poor district around
the rich center. Much the same thing happened when Brazil created its new
capital city, Brasilia in the middle of nowhere. People do what people do. *No, I was never a golfer apart from
some Pitch and Putt. Kinda lean to Mark Twain’s view that
golf is a good walk spoiled. SO
FAR, YOU ARE WE (Said
to AI Claude) No
escaping it, it’s difficult to talk about the impact of new technology on
society without commenting repeatedly on machine intelligence, AI, about
which we hear startling new reports almost daily. An associate conceived
of, then developed a true digital neural net AI system way back in the
mid-1980s .(I was working on “machine learning” in that era, teaching
that system to read handwriting…that is, cursive script, It worked so well
that we thought I’d done something wrong, that it was showing positive results
when it shouldn’t. Mind you, we were running this on slow personal computers
with about 250 K of RAM, …the unremarkable laptop computer on which I’m
typing this has 16 GB of RAM.) He told me recently that things are moving
so fast that he can’t keep up. This from a guy three times as smart as I,
who has been pointing out for years that AI developers tend
out of habit to create unnecessary constraints that limit the
performance of the systems they are designing. A
couple of months ago, I asked the free, lowest level version of Anthropic’s Claude to tell me about the history of the
three-letter codes used to identify airports. Claude helpfully did that,
but also did something intriguing, commenting that an airport had been named
in "honour" of somebody...after spelling
the word as "honor" elsewhere. I asked why the switch to
the British v Yankee spelling. Claude said he…well it’s a man’s name…had
slipped into it. Slipped into it? ...and off we went into a more general
discussion. Without
really probing,
just plugging away indifferently in text full of typos, I wasn’t responding
to Lowest Level Claude’s questions alertly…but Claude did begin to
probe, asking questions and making observations that were entirely
relevant, on issues that I had not raised. We ended the session quickly, with some issues left
open, and I moved on to other chores, It took a
while for the impact of this to hit me. When I went back to Claude later, he
did not recognize me, and did not recall our conversation so we couldn’t
continue it, but when I asked, he told me that I could enter the text
of the earlier exchange, and he could probably pick up from there.
Haven’t done that yet, but will. Lowest Level Claude’s capability is
startling. You’ll
find that first conversation now at the bottom of the Previous Two Issues
page, and my hope is to add later conversations to it if they prove
interesting. We shall see. The “you are we” line came up just casually in the conversation with Claude when it was emphasized that that this LLM entity (and, presumably all other AI/LLMs) “is” only what it has learned from existing human communication. NELS
MUSES Some years ago, the Correspo commented on reports of a major
study the Military was conducting to figure out how to use autonomous or
semi-autonomous robots to carry heavy stuff for infantry in the field. One
imagined exotic, stealthy, easily camouflaged critters lugging all sorts of
supplies and arms, and it was slightly disappointing that best the experts
could come up with looked like a Jeep. Well time has passed, technology has
progressed dramatically, and those vehicles are starting to be introduced. They
seem to be effective and sure enough, they still look pretty much like Jeeps Item: Just a minor clarification: in the AI conversation,
we refer to long-gone-much-missed dilithium press.
No, the lower case d and p are not typos, and it makes for some confusion.
This format gave them a logo, dp, which
works well in lower case, but not in upper, DP. As far as
I know, the Star Trek people never complained about this commercial
use of the term dilithium that they had made much
of…probably because it’s a real chemical. (In contrast, the Star Wars
folks did have their lawyers send a stern letter to the International
Personal Robot Association…back in the early 80’s…telling us not to use the
term Droid for our Golden Droid award. Well, OK, apparently
they had not originated the term, and had picked it up somewhere for their
entertaining use, but we didn’t have the money to argue about it, so we
stopped.) Item: The Correspo
has speculated more than once that each of us (people) is a committee, formed
of a vast number of cells of many types, each with a life of its own,
presumably acting in its own interests, but perhaps also in the interest of
the whole critter of which they are part. Not only that, but various types of
cells are distributed through the whole body. E.g
neurons are found not just in the brain. Further, the activities of the whole
are influenced by the “gut biome,” microorganisms that live in the digestive
system…and by an “external biome,” a big assortment of organisms that live on
our skin and in all nooks and crannies, affecting what we do. (This calls
into some question the old line that Cleanliness is next to Godliness. Um,
are we doing the right thing by applying Dove or Dial to wash away these
parts of our systems? I’ve no idea, but it was interesting to watch an interview by Jesse Michel of Dr. Eric Haseltine and his wife Dr. Chris Gilbert
in which Dr. Haseltine speculates along the same lines. That’s a long
interview, 3 hours, that covers all sorts of controversial topics like UAPs,
the Havana Syndrome, consciousness, and more, leaving me, for one, with no
confidence that I actually learned anything…but it’s
intriguing. You’re on your own. ITEM FROM THE PAST This
item from what must have been 1986 or 1987,
about forty years ago, is brought to mind by…well,
all the current frenzy of activity in the
field of Artificial (or “Machine”) Intelligence. FAULTY IS
BETTER Now that "random
algorithms" (programs that depend on some degree of disorder to work)
are all the rage in the academic computer literature, it's entertaining
to recall that "MIKE," the speech recognition system produced by
Centigram Corporation ten years ago, depended on such randomness. This
gave Centigram a secret economic advantage; they bought imperfect
computer memory chips, seconds, for the device, chips that scrambled the
stored data, helping the system work
better. They paid less for the imperfect chips than for perfect
ones. Ironic, what? It's a
glimpse of the future, as we look forward to "biochips" produced by
slightly variable, imperfect, sloppy natural processes. Centigram
Corporation, set up in the early ‘80s by
George Glaser and a couple of associates, used
a basic technology of Iben Browning’s to recognize
patterns in strings of bits representing human
speech. That’s now a common, even trivial
capability in most personal computers (a few
years ago, I was startled to see coherent, sensible
text being created on my screen, and couldn’t
figure out where it was coming from. Turns
out I’d absentmindedly hit the “Dictate”
button
in WORD, and the computer was dutifully taking
dictation from the radio on my desk. That would
have been mind-boggling in the mid-1980s, but
was only a minor annoyance in the early 2020s. Centigram’s
system was still very limited; subject to
“saturation.” That is, after a certain amount of training,
everything began to sound to MIKE like everything
else. “Machine Learning” had to be cut
off before that. (I have recounted elsewhere what
happened when MIKE was accidentally overtrained
before being demonstrated on national television…on
the Today Show with Tom Brokaw.) The
critical point here is that smart systems appear To rely
on imperfection…not just in the hardware, but
in the entire holistic approach. When you enter anything…training
material, a query, whatever, the only system about whose internal workings I know
anything at all asks itself, “of all the strings of
bits I have ever seen, what does this new one most
remind me of?” To answer that question, it treats
that string of bits as an address in its vast memory
space, and looks to see if it already has anything
stored there…or close to there. If it finds something,
it thinks “Oh, this must ‘mean’ approximately
the same thing.” Like crowdsourcing, it
uses hunches, Things get much more specific and
logical after that, and miracles of programming have
been wrought to give us the astonishing performance
we now commonly expect. Still, the basis
of the whole thing is the acceptance of uncertainty.
That’s what Centigram was coming to grips with in the mid-1980s…not very long ago. May 2026 THAT SOUNDS VAGUELY FAMILIAR In the 1960's, some people with us at the
Thomas Bede Foundation in Los Altos CA were also grad students of
John McCarthy at Stanford. He was trying to teach computers to think
the way people do...using if-then logic, heuristics, etc. This, of
course, was very different from Iben's holistic, biological approach,
dealing with messy reality as it presents itself instead of trying
to figure out all the rules These days, even with neural net technology upon
us, most people have an underlying conviction that what's now routinely
called AI is fundamentally different from Human Intelligence. That's what
all the fuss is about in Hollywood: “Machines don't originate new
ideas; they just put together bits and pieces of things they've seen
before." An associate steered us to this thoughtful commentary by Charles Hugh Smith,
worrying about AI. Smith lists half a dozen negative
points about AI systems: That all looks
mighty human. JUST A RECOLLECTION The Aviation Circle website has commented, “San Francisco International Airport
has long been famous for landing two aircraft side by side on parallel
runways just 750 feet apart. It was one of the most iconic sights in
commercial aviation.” In announcing that the practice is ending, Aerospace Global News displays pictures of 2020s airliners
making those parallel landings (shot with a long lens that makes them look
closer together than they really were). I recall those simultaneous
landings on side-by-side runways ever so vividly from 1957. Based in San
Francisco, in urgent need of a job just out of school, I was flying as
a purser for Southwest Airways (no connection with current Southwest
Airlines) up and down the California central valley and the coast between
L.A. and Crescent City. A typical shift involved sixteen takeoffs and sixteen
landings in a scheduled seven hours and forty-one minutes…and we occasionally
made it on time. Southwest flew pokey little DC-3s, really refurbished
C47s purchased inexpensively as war-surplus. We routinely landed alongside
other planes in SFO, and one image is burned into my memory. One day as
we came fluttering in, I looked out to see a gorgeous Lockheed Constellation overtaking us on the parallel runway. The most beautiful plane ever built for commercial service,
with that dolphin-shaped body, the unique triple tail, and the long nose
wheel gear reaching out for the ground…it swept by us grandly. A sight to
see. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NELS
MUSES Smart new technology is used increasingly in
agriculture to make operations precise, and limit wasteful material
consumption. [See this argument that drones are becoming basic tools on the farm
as much as plows are.] Back when I worked as a
gopher/grip/writer/director for an industrial film producer, often in the
field, I learned that the most common cause of death among crop dusting
pilots was shovels. The field hands occasionally stuck long-handled shovels in
the ground in a row where they had stopped work, so that they could find the
spot easily when they returned. Sometimes a crop duster straddling that row
would encounter the shovel handle before the worker returned, smashing his
prop and crashing. Even if a drone hits such an obstacle, its pilot isn’t
likely to be there to participate in the crash. Progress. Item: This showed up in my inbox the other day…a link to a guy talking about water.
Well, it wasn’t just any guy, it was physicist Richard Feynman, one
of the most provocative, entertaining lecturers who ever talked to a group.
He wasn’t just a speculator, but the real goods who did productive work
instead of just annoying people by upsetting established ideas. I remember
his talk There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom from some decades ago.
Riveting. He’d have been 106 this month (died in 1988) so there’s not likely
to be more from him. You can find him here and there on the web, and it may
be wise to watch him before people start to forget him . Item:
A couple of startling robots: this two-legged-walking-rolling-jumping critter is remarkable, and this not-yet-very-smart-kind of-ugly-determined-humanoid-shmumanoid guy is scary. You’ll find several videos in this excellent paper. In both cases, we come back to the fundamental problem of giving the thing enough energy so that it runs long enough to do anything useful, but that problem is steadily being addressed. Item: …and speaking of things that just seem interesting, this vertical take-off and landing vehicle is strikingly different from other things flitting around our skies. _____________________________________________
ITEM FROM THE PAST This item from 1998 is brought to mind by a
recent problem with
playing a CD disc on a newer…um…record
player. TEXAS TRAVAIL While Florida and California are toying with laws
requiring licenses for computer salesmen and special tests for truth in
computer advertising, and Massachusetts holds off the future by permitting
only certified teachers to teach anybody anything, a Texas law requires
public schools to teach "computer literacy," still undefined. Some
Texas teachers furtively confided to a visiting speaker that they expect a
committee of aging computer experts, offended by the shameless, undisciplined
freedom of the personal computing era, to force universal study of
"real" computing methods and languages like FORTRAN and COBOL,
the best tools of two decades ago, and to become comfortable with the use
of punched cards and paper tape. Change comes hard. Some
mechanical drawing instructors probably still teach students to draw on linen
in India Ink by candlelight. As Texas goes, so goes the nation,
what? Worth watching. Recall
the Correspo’s recent observation
that colleges
are now starting to teach “computer literacy,”
now somewhat more clearly defined than
it was twenty-eight years ago, because many students have never used any computers other
than their smartphones, and there are some
straightforward differences even from laptops
that will become obstacles to the learning process in many classes. Things
do change rather rapidly; a couple of years
ago I was working with some competent computerists
who had never seen a genuinely floppy
5¼” floppy disk…nor even a 2½” floppy- disk-inside-a
rigid case…both of which have been
replaced by thumb drives with capacity that astounds me. So, I took along some samples of
those vintage objects, and the guys were amazed
to see them and hear about them. Indeed,
while I was at it, I took along some actual
paper punch cards
that people used to store
programs and data, and which we bought in boxes
of two thousand (I think). They couldn’t
believe what they were seeing. Luckily, Dar
Scott had used such cards back in the day, and
was able to explain the ancient lore of IBM cards
to them. I would have taken along some punched
paper tape, more convenient in many cases
than the cards, but couldn’t find any. Aw. In
fact, I never used the cards or the tape directly
myself, not being a programmer. There was
a brief failed attempt to teach me Fortran, but
I understand technical matters only in terms
of analogies, and there’s nothing so loosey- goosey
as that about Fortran, so we turned quickly
to other things. Interesting
fact about punched cards: though they
were used in the Jacquard Loom as long ago
as 1775, the modern card developed by Herman
Hollerith (founder of IBM) in 1890 to record
census information, was reportedly made in
an especially convenient standard size…that of
U.S. paper currency. Later,
in the 1930s, the size of currency bills was reduced
to what we use now…but if you want to get
a sense of the “blanket bills” of old, find an IBM
card somewhere. ITEM FROM THE PAST This
item from what must have been 1986 or 1987,
about forty years ago, is brought to mind by…well,
all the current frenzy of activity in the
field of Artificial (or “Machine”) Intelligence. FAULTY IS
BETTER Now that "random
algorithms" (programs that depend on some degree of disorder to work)
are all the rage in the academic computer literature, it's entertaining
to recall that "MIKE," the speech recognition system produced by
Centigram Corporation ten years ago, depended on such randomness. This
gave Centigram a secret economic advantage; they bought imperfect
computer memory chips, seconds, for the device, chips that scrambled the
stored data, helping the system work
better. They paid less for the imperfect chips than for perfect
ones. Ironic, what? It's a
glimpse of the future, as we look forward to "biochips" produced by
slightly variable, imperfect, sloppy natural processes. Centigram
Corporation, set up in the early ‘80s by
George Glaser and a couple of associates, used
a basic technology of Iben Browning’s to recognize
patterns in strings of bits representing human
speech. That’s now a common, even trivial
capability in most personal computers (a few
years ago, I was startled to see coherent, sensible
text being created on my screen, and couldn’t
figure out where it was coming from. Turns
out I’d absentmindedly hit the “Dictate”
button
in WORD, and the computer was dutifully taking
dictation from the radio on my desk. That would
have been mind-boggling in the mid-1980s, but
was only a minor annoyance in the early 2020s. Centigram’s
system was still very limited; subject to
“saturation.” That is, after a certain amount of training,
everything began to sound to MIKE like everything
else. “Machine Learning” had to be cut
off before that. (I have recounted elsewhere what
happened when MIKE was accidentally overtrained
before being demonstrated on national television…on
the Today Show with Tom Brokaw.) The
critical point here is that smart systems appear To rely
on imperfection…not just in the hardware, but
in the entire holistic approach. When you enter anything…training
material, a query, whatever, the only system about whose internal workings I know
anything at all asks itself, “of all the strings of
bits I have ever seen, what does this new one most
remind me of?” To answer that question, it treats
that string of bits as an address in its vast memory
space, and looks to see if it already has anything
stored there…or close to there. If it finds something,
it thinks “Oh, this must ‘mean’ approximately
the same thing.” Like crowdsourcing, it
uses hunches, Things get much more specific and
logical after that, and miracles of programming have
been wrought to give us the astonishing performance
we now commonly expect. Still, the basis
of the whole thing is the acceptance of uncertainty.
That’s what Centigram was coming to grips
with in the mid-1980s…not very long ago. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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 |
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