“Not sure I see your point. All the high speed connections were built long before bittorrent came along, and they were being used for idiotic point-to-point centralised transfers.”
No they weren’t. The days of Napster and Bit Torrent were, by no coincidence, also the days when Internet speed was in the process of ramping up enough to make them useful.
But of course, the reason we all heard of Napster wasn’t that it was the first peer-to-peer data sharing system. On the contrary, we heard of it because it came so late that by the time it arrived, the infrastructure to make it useful was actually being built. Ever heard of UUCP? Few have. That’s because in its day—the 70s and 80s—the infrastructure was by and large not there yet.
A clever algorithm, or even a clever implementation thereof, is only one small piece of a real-world solution. If we want to build useful AGI systems—or so much as a useful Sunday market stall—our plans must be built around that fact.
“Not sure I see your point. All the high speed connections were built long before bittorrent came along, and they were being used for idiotic point-to-point centralised transfers.”
No they weren’t. The days of Napster and Bit Torrent were, by no coincidence, also the days when Internet speed was in the process of ramping up enough to make them useful.
But of course, the reason we all heard of Napster wasn’t that it was the first peer-to-peer data sharing system. On the contrary, we heard of it because it came so late that by the time it arrived, the infrastructure to make it useful was actually being built. Ever heard of UUCP? Few have. That’s because in its day—the 70s and 80s—the infrastructure was by and large not there yet.
A clever algorithm, or even a clever implementation thereof, is only one small piece of a real-world solution. If we want to build useful AGI systems—or so much as a useful Sunday market stall—our plans must be built around that fact.