AI and Me!
That’s a topic to explore – with maybe more than one or two caves to venture into.
Let’s start back in my high school days. Let me situate that in actual light years – or rather on a calendar. Look to the late 1960’s. Campbell Collegiate in Regina, SK is on the cutting edge of technology. We have one course in computer programming in my final year of high school. I learned a language that is now fairly well obsolete – Fortran IV (pronounced Fortran Four).
The handwritten programming script was sent to another high school in town – Balfour – where typists would create punch cards. The punch cards would be run through a “computer” (which at that point had vacuum tubes and was located in a high-security area with air conditioning and dust control). Errors would be detected and the process would start all over again until a satisfactory answer was spit out on computer paper.
Our class toured the actual computer facility run by a provincial crown corporation. The hype around this new technology was immense. IBM was prominent, programming (coding) was a new and untested area of vocation and we were the generation that would usher in this new approach to life and living. One of my fellow students ended up a few years later at MIT and, as I understand the timeline, was involved in some of the world’s initial AI development.
Imagine the curiosity that flowed in the conversations of that class. We were taught to be open to a new way of doing things. I’m sure previous generations were antagonistic to what we were doing – we wrote them off as uninformed. Some forward thinkers would encourage us – we welcomed their applause. Who could have imagined that the abacus of long ago would evolve into today’s AI?
But even then I had some reservations. Triggered by watching a movie in Grade 10. If you guessed “2001 – a Space Odyssey” you might know where I am heading.
