Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience


What made generative AI possible? What are its capabilities and limitations? How will it shape our future?

I generally believe that successful technologies become invisible, dissolved into the fabric of society. They supplant older, previously valuable skills. Few of us would now survive as hunter-gatherers, but almost all of us can now use a search engine to query the world’s knowledge base. Having said that, qualitative reasoning and intuition regarding orders of…