Dennis H. Lewis traces how AI fits into cycles of transformative tech like personal computers and the internet. He shares stories from early computing days and argues this cycle will be more impactful than the ones before it.
Chapters
AI is just getting off the ground really, to be honest. But this is just another cycle. If you're going to ask me to be old today, I'm going to say I've been through all of the cycles.
What was the first one?
The first one that I saw was the age of the first personal computers. So the Apple ii, that's how old I really am.
How did you feel like when you first got to witness the first computer?
Well, that's a great question. I remember and I'm really dated here. I remember going with my dad to. He had a, he had a computer science degree and he would bring home this terminal that had a roll of paper on it and you would, it would connect to the, to the mainframe on the university and I could play adventure. And it was a text based game where you would like. It would say you are standing in front of a, of a, of a wall and there are green sparklies around you and all of this is happening on paper. It's printing it out on paper. You're reading the paper and you're asking kind of like a fax, but you could type back to the. So you were interacting with the computer but the computer didn't have a screen.
It would just print it out on paper.
On paper. And it was this roll of paper and I remember being told that I had to be careful not to use up all the paper. Oh, I even remember when my dad would bring home programs on punch cards, punch cards, which were these paper cards that had holes in them and, and the program was like a box of 200 or 500 cards that had to be punched. Holes in the right place. Really old stuff, eh?
Was that the biggest cycle you've been through before A.I.
No, no.
I mean probably the Internet revolution was bigger.
So the. Yeah, I was gonna say the Internet was definitely a really big one. But don't discard the. Just the idea of computers becoming ubiquitous.
