I’ve been interested in Artificial Intelligence, through many different lenses, for quite some time. As a science fiction fan and one time author, it’s obviously a subject that’s been treated thoroughly from every angle. It’s good! It’s bad! It’s going to end humanity!
But it (“actual” AI) felt incredibly far away even just a few years ago. At that point in time, I did a bit of work in Text Classification and Object Detection and the results were definitely mixed.
Years ago, I stumbled across a lecture by John Ousterhout. (You might know him as the creator of Tcl, or just as a general computer science luminary.) It was part of his weekend thought series, and one line has stuck with me ever since — straightforward, but the kind of thing that you see echo in many applications:
A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept. By way of reminder, picture two lines on a graph.
Quite a while ago, I wrote a review of The New Turing Omnibus. A very clever book whose double entendre title reinforced the wit with which the subject matter was to be handled. In short, a very fun book that covers a lot of Computer Science topics.
What’s interesting though is how one tiny passage in the foreword changed my outlook on something important. Here it is:
Sometime during my childhood I encountered the traditional image of a bird that erodes a mountain by taking a single stone from it every year.
This last week I was sitting with friends around a campfire and told the following true story. They found it rather interesting, so I figured it was worth retelling. The truth is, my career has been a really weird one…there’s nothing linear about any of the progression through work that I’ve chosen. It has been a truly wild ride, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Amazon. 1999. It was a totally different company than it is now, though in many ways it’s probably still Day 1.