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The ABQ
Correspondent Previous Two Issues AI Conversation at
the bottom (nothing new yet) September 2026 LIFTING, MOVING, AND FITTING…OR? There’s endless debate about how huge
stones (notably at
Sacsayhuamán in Peru) were shaped and fitted together in structures so
carefully that not even fine blades, can be slid between them. The
phenomenon is not limited to Peru, but appears here and there around the
world, remaining from times long ago. It seems improbable that the folks who
built these structures carved immense blocks out of quarries, moved
those blocks around (at altitudes exceeding 12,000 feet), and put the
somewhat irregularly shaped blocks together in useful formations precisely with
the tools we’re aware of. They must really have done it it (whatever
“it” is), because there the structures are, not asking our expert approval
to exist. One suggestion that’s widely pooh-poohed is that they were
cast in place. That would answer a lot of the questions about their
construction, but the art of creating the soft stone material, and pouring
it or patting it into place to solidify in the desired form is not commonly
known, if at all. Well, a chap named a chap named Marcell Fóti not only says he can do it, but
he demonstrates the process in considerable
detail, making all his information public. He’s not in your face while doing
it, just matter-of-fact. That’s nice, and maybe he’s even really doing what
he says he is. The takeaway from this can be summed up in a line: Ancients
who built things with these techniques wouldn’t have needed huge cranes and
power sources and hordes of workers; they had only to carry a bucket of
stuff from one place to another. The discussion about
why we gave up using such a helpful technique is
another matter, quite apart from its practicality. It
recalls my reading in high school about Benvenuto
Celllini’s casting his big statue of Perseus
with the Head of Medusa
in the mid -1500s. It was a wild,
nerve-wracking affair, using the Lost Wax Process on a
large scale. For years I wondered how we had managed to
lose that process in a mere 400 years. It was a
relief to learn finally that it’s the wax that’s lost, not
the process. Oh. GROUNDING
AGAIN Last
month’s Correspo commented on the normal-at-one-time dragging of
iron chains by vehicles with the intention of draining off the static
electricity the moving vehicles accumulate, so that the person in the
vehicle doesn’t receive an unwelcome shock when getting out of it. I had seen
the bouncing chains long ago, but not recently, and remarked that I don’t
know how the problem is currently handled. WELL! Readers did let me
know that while “The grounding straps that once adorned the
undersides of cars have largely fallen out of favor due to the advancements
in tire technology and the electrical systems of modern vehicles,” they are
still generally
available in many forms. Instead of chains, the devices tend to be strips
of rubber or rubber-like material with embedded copper wire that serves as
the conductor without sparking. Surprisingly (to me, anyway) these
things are considered by many to relieve not only electrical shocks, but
“sickness.” Lots of folks suffer from motion sickness, and must be
careful when traveling in cars and airplanes, but this is the first we’ve
heard such queasiness linked to static electricity…and by multiple
commentators. One Amazon customer is pleased that his grounding strap
relieves the sickness of his dogs in the car. He says that the nuisance
of being stopped occasionally by cops pointing out helpfully that he’s
dragging something under his car is a modest price to pay for keeping the
dogs from woopsing on the upholstery. What? Authorities (well, the internet)
point out that there’s no scientific evidence relating static and upset
stomach, but if the grounding strap helps the dogs, good for them. The
internet authorities tend to be very firm on declaring that the static
shocks, though annoying, are very mild. This recalls some time
spent in Las Vegas many years ago, stage managing industrial conventions.
It’s DRY in Vegas, and there are many long, carpeted corridors to walk
through while picking up significant personal static charges. If,
on encountering a door, one reaches out with a bare hand, the ensuing shock
may be substantial,
not fatal, but WOW! One learned to touch the door handle first with the hotel
key, which would achieve grounding without knocking your glasses off. It was
common to see a person or two lurking quietly near the door. Those were
people who didn’t have their hotel keys with them, waiting for somebody else
to open the door, so they could rush through unscathed before it closed. This
brings us to another question of modern times; now that hotel room
keys are typically plastic cards instead of pieces of metal…what’s the
handiest way to avoid being zapped? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NELS
MUSES Item: The Correspo has commented more than once on
the use of real human brain cells (again…not excised from anybody’s brain,
but grown from stem cells that might be taken from a bit of cuticle) linked
with input/output hardware to do fast, large-scale computing. Lots of challenges
…see somebody’s worry about cells not developing in the
right order. Item: The
web is displaying reports of progress in the restoration of the
first Air Force One. On a late afternoon in the Fall of 1956 at San
Francisco International Airport, I had parked and was walking to the terminal
for an evening flight when I noticed a small crowd gathered near the low
fence separating the employee parking lot from the airport proper. I stopped
to watch as a Lockheed Constellation (of which we have spoken admiringly
before) pulled up to a gate in that fence …unusually, not at a gate at a
terminal concourse…and a stairway was quickly wheeled out to it. The door
soon opened, and President Eisenhower emerged, waving casually to the crowd.
He came down the steps, and was driven away without ceremony. What I recall
most sharply was that the plane was shiny. A whole troupe of people must have
polished that thing at every opportunity. The late afternoon sun was behind
us, and the airplane was blindingly SHINY. Startlingly, that’s the very plane
now being restored, the Columbine 2, which will be one of only three
flying Constellations when they complete the work. I saw the first Air Force
One with my own eyes. It wasn’t an event of importance, but, gee. Item: One recalls hearing about the predictable fate of
the Micronesian island and world’s third-smallest country, Nauru as long ago as the 1960s. They had
something of significant value: large deposits of easily accessible phosphates…and
they were mining it so aggressively that the island itself would eventually
be unlivable, eaten up. Since then, sea levels have been rising and fast food
has come to Nauru. Not much good is happening to those folks. The current
approach to solving their problems is political; their government has
announced that the country’s name is formally being
changed to its more traditional form “Naoero.” Maybe that
will help. ___________________________________________
ITEM FROM THE PAST We
used this item from 2006 as a “Past” piece as
recently as 2020, which doesn’t seem long enough to
give it a fresh “Past” sheen, but what the heck. Item: Actor Dennis Weaver died recently, reminding some of us
of a situation that has for years made us laugh every time we heard his name.
When he played in the long-running television series McCloud, as a colorful Wild West lawman working in New York, he once
explained to another character that he was from Taos (which he pronounced as
TAYoss) in Sandoval (which he pronounced as Sand OH vle) County in New
Mexico. The residents of Taos (which they pronounce as TAH-ohss), which is in
Taos County, not Sandoval (which is locally pronounced SAND oh val) were much
aggrieved. He apologized, and visited Taos in a blare of publicity to make
amends. The forgiving citizens were greatly pleased, and slaughtered a
buffalo for a grand barbecue on the occasion. Mr. Weaver proved to be a
vegetarian. This
comes to mind because we often cringe when
Ross
Coulthart, the prominent Aussie commentator on
Unidentified Autonomous Phenomena (UAPs), refers
to events here in New Mexico, which he does frequently
because we have so much UFO/UAP activity
here. He typically pronounces “Bernalillo,” (locally
pronounced Bernal-eeyo) as Bernal-illo, which
makes even us transplanted Midwesterners uneasy.
Mind you, this doesn’t indicate a character flaw
in Mr. Coulthart any more than TAYoss showed bad
character in Mr. Weaver. How
would an auslander know how to pronounce Taos any
more than I know whether the Opal Capital of the Universe,
Coober Pedy in Australia, is Coober Peddy or
Coober Peedy? …and for that matter, harking back
to Milwaukee, I’d pronounce the “r” in Coober like
the “r” in ring. Despite
all the UFO/UAP activity reported here, including
the recent disappearance of General McCasland,
a reportedly high-level insider in Non- Human-Intelligence
affairs, I’ve never seen any of it.
Before the trees got so big out back, we had a good
view of the sky over Sandia Laboratories at Kirtland
Air Force Base, ostensibly a hotbed of NHI
activity…but nothing. One heard a story, for example,
that a barrel-shaped UFO had landed inside
the Sandia Tech Area, sat on the ground for a
few minutes in full view of high managerial people involved
in our nuclear weapons program, and had then
departed quietly. Nobody reported this officially …it
was just gossip from seventy years ago. It’s disappointing
not to have seen anything personally. Another
landing did get quite a lot of publicity. During
one of the early Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta events
(I was at the very first one with three of our kids
when thirteen, count them thirteen, balloons launched
in a mass ascension from the parking lot at the
Coronado Shopping Center) a pilot who had brought
his balloon all the way from Finland found himself
unable to maintain altitude…reportedly, his balloon
was extensively patched with Scotch Tape… so
he landed in a clear spot, and was surprised to see heavily
armed people running at him from several directions.
He had landed in the same Tech Area inside the
Atomic Bomb Works that the officially unreported UFO
had some years earlier. This poor fellow had more
official attention than he really felt a need for. 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 1974, 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-two 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. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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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