Looking Inward, Looking Outward

Artificial Intelligence is in the news.

Again!

Looking Inward

Sometime between 2700 and 2300 BC , Sumerian newspapers blazed headlines about the introduction of abacuses, with which merchant clerks could check imports and export dockets faster than, it seemed, the blink of an eye. That's roughly 4,500 years ago. I have found no data on the nature of the beads. Could have been coffee-beans, for all I know.

Some 4,440 years later - mid 1960s, 28 boys in 4th and 5th-year classes – matriculation stream – at Governor Stirling Senior High School were allowed to use slide-rules in class, but NOT in mid-term tests or end-of-term examinations. Oh No! Pencil-and-paper and the use of books of logarithmic and trigonometric tables to four decimal places were the norm.

When was the last time you saw a slide-rule being used in front of your face. Not on a YouTube video, but in real-life?

Have you used a slide-rule?

Do you know what it is, let alone, how to use it?

Napier's Bones rarely gets a mention anywhere excepting in my web pages.

Looking Outward

Starting with today, numerous news articles, usually under the heading "Analysis" or "Perspective" natter on about how these Large Language Models scrape juvenile posts from TikTok and social media areas and call that intelligent data. That post you made on how to tell if your house-trained cat is truly in a romantic relationship with your feral dog is rubbish, and that's what goes into the LLM machines.

Care to read my post about ChatBot ignoring the value of Pi in the calculation of the volume of a cylinder?

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