It didn’t seem to me as though things changed very much until the 90′s.
I had access to a basic-programmable shared time teletype ’73 & ’74, dial-up and a local IBM (we loaded cards, got printo of results) ‘74-‘78 @ swarthmore college, programmed in Fortran for Radioastronomers ‘78-’80 and so on… I always took computers for granted and assumed through that entire time period that it was “too late” to get in on the ground floor because everybody already knew.
I never realized before now how lucky I was, how little excuse I have for not being rich.
Did anyone else expect that self-driving cars would be so much easier than natural language?
If by “expect” you mean BEFORE I knew the result? :) It is very hard to make predictions, ESPECIALLY about the future. Now I didn’t anticipate this would happen, but as it happens it seems very sensible.
Stuff we were particularly evolved to do is more complex than stuff we use our neocortex for, stuff we were not particularly evolved to do. I think we systematically underestimate how hard language is because we have all sorts of eolutionarily provided “black boxes” to help us along that we seem blind too until we try to duplicate the function outside our heads. Driving, on the other hand, we are not particularly well evolved to do, so we have had to make it so simple that even a neocortex can do it. Probably the hardest part of automated driving is bringing the situational awareness into the machine driving the car: interpreting camera images to tell what a stoplight is doing, where the other cars are and how they are moving, and so on, which all recapitulate things we are well evolved to do.
But no, automated driving before relatively natural language interfaces was a shocking result to me as well.
And I can’t WAIT to get one of those cars. Although my daughter getting her learner’s permit in half a year is almost as good ( what do I care whether google drives me around or Julia does?)
I had access to a basic-programmable shared time teletype ’73 & ’74, dial-up and a local IBM (we loaded cards, got printo of results) ‘74-‘78 @ swarthmore college, programmed in Fortran for Radioastronomers ‘78-’80 and so on… I always took computers for granted and assumed through that entire time period that it was “too late” to get in on the ground floor because everybody already knew.
I never realized before now how lucky I was, how little excuse I have for not being rich.
If by “expect” you mean BEFORE I knew the result? :) It is very hard to make predictions, ESPECIALLY about the future. Now I didn’t anticipate this would happen, but as it happens it seems very sensible.
Stuff we were particularly evolved to do is more complex than stuff we use our neocortex for, stuff we were not particularly evolved to do. I think we systematically underestimate how hard language is because we have all sorts of eolutionarily provided “black boxes” to help us along that we seem blind too until we try to duplicate the function outside our heads. Driving, on the other hand, we are not particularly well evolved to do, so we have had to make it so simple that even a neocortex can do it. Probably the hardest part of automated driving is bringing the situational awareness into the machine driving the car: interpreting camera images to tell what a stoplight is doing, where the other cars are and how they are moving, and so on, which all recapitulate things we are well evolved to do.
But no, automated driving before relatively natural language interfaces was a shocking result to me as well.
And I can’t WAIT to get one of those cars. Although my daughter getting her learner’s permit in half a year is almost as good ( what do I care whether google drives me around or Julia does?)