Do you agree that Technology is going too far?

[Boogs]

I remember when RAM was 32 k (not megs), and 64 k was huge. 128 k was almost entering fantasy land. Now they have 1,000,000 times that and still don't have room. Sloppy, sloppy,sloppy.

Ha! My first computer had a whole 2K RAM! I quickly maxed it out to the full 12K. Sheer luxury!

 

[Judge]

Ha! My first computer had a whole 2K RAM! I quickly maxed it out to the full 12K. Sheer luxury!

Mine came with 1 MB of RAM. I thought I was omnipotent increasing it to a whole 3 Megs using an additional board with multiple chips on it. A DOS 3.0 interface before Windows. Back when new technology still seemed innocent. A very different time...for sure.

 

[Boogs]

Ah, PC's...
Takes me back to my first hard disk - a whole 10 Megs of magnetic storage! Who needs 5¼" floppies any more!

 

[Aspergers_Aspie]

I was reading the guardian newspaper and saw a story about Google deep mind and I saw this YouTube video what are your thoughts please?Link to video

 

[Boogs]

Got about 2/3rds into it before I had to give up, too stomach churning for me, visually speaking especially.
Did not like this vid one little bit at all. It came across to me as a google puff piece. So much of what was said had no basis, it was more of a scifi dream, and frankly a lot of it was disturbing and never looked at critically or in real world scenarios. Sorry, but this is BS as far as I'm concerned, it's sales talk. None of the images made any positive addition to the voice over, all just very phatic high tech fantasy type stuff. Very off-putting for myself.
Guardian though does do some very good technology articles, and thankfully it's not video.

 

[Shevek]

I paid $100 to double the memory on my first computer, all the way up to 2 kb. It only ran BASIC. I still miss the programs I wrote for it to make engineering easy.

On AI, as with much other technology, I think that the problem is not so much with the tech itself but with it being owned by people who already have far too much power. History has many points where it took a lot of luck for our planet and species to produce us. I suspect that the beings in the UFOs all had the good luck to get personal wealth differences under control during their agricultural phase when it first became possible, before it got multiplied with machines.

 

[Boogs]

I paid $100 to double the memory on my first computer, all the way up to 2 kb.

Pah! My first computer actually came with 2kb! I honestly can't remember how much I paid for all those little IC 'beetles' to whack it up to the insanely large 10Kb or how I managed to plug 'em in without bending all those legs!
What's more, it's basic had a built in 6502 assembler! So there!

I suspect that the beings in the UFOs all had the good luck to get personal wealth differences under control

Maybe they were a little more mature than us?

 

[NB79]

my first pc was an 8088 i think, that was the first pc right??, then the 8086 etc.
then there were the 286 386 486 then pentium.
I remember looking for games at a game store, there was a flight combat sim of a whole 15 mb. i said to the vendor: wow this game fills up almost half the disk or something like that.

 

[Misty Avich]

I've been watching YouTube videos of animatronics malfunctioning, and while they creep me out big time, I still don't feel like things like that are a threat to humanity. They're just a pile of cables and circuits. They can't get us. And androids and other machinery can and will only do what they're programmed to do by humans, otherwise they are just objects. They're not going to grow their own minds and attack us.

 

[MildredHubble]

After watching the latest video from Fran Blanch, one of my favourite YouTubers, I really think AI is going too far. I would post a link but (uncharacteristically for her) Fran drops quite a few "F bombs" in this one.

It seems these Tech Bros are just way too keen to let technologies loose before we even really understand them. In this case it misgendered Fran several times in comments the "AI" left on her videos and there's no way to prevent it from commenting on videos. There's no "off switch".

There's too much of a "Let's just let it loose and see what kind of damage is done so we can refine the next version..." attitude. People are unwittingly being used as AI test subjects and I just think it's wrong.

 

[Boogs]

my first pc was an 8088 i think, that was the first pc right??, then the 8086 etc.
then there were the 286 386 486 then pentium.
I remember looking for games at a game store, there was a flight combat sim of a whole 15 mb. i said to the vendor: wow this game fills up almost half the disk or something like that.

Yeah, although the 8086 came before the 8088. Also the 286/386 and I think even the 486 had options with or without a floating point coprocessor (the SX and DX versions).

I've been watching YouTube videos of animatronics malfunctioning, and while they creep me out big time, I still don't feel like things like that are a threat to humanity. They're just a pile of cables and circuits. They can't get us. And androids and other machinery can and will only do what they're programmed to do by humans, otherwise they are just objects. They're not going to grow their own minds and attack us.

They are puppets, nothing more. I think it's mostly Hollywood who have given us this idea of humanoid type evil robots who only want to wipe out all humans, so that they then have no purpose and can turn themselves off (or something like that?) because they'd have no purpose any more.
The real horror is the humans who want to make and use them.

 

[Boogs]

It seems these Tech Bros are just way too keen to let technologies loose before we even really understand them.

I think they are initially doing everything in their power to get AI out inn the public domain, and most of all, adopted by businesses before governments can start to regulate them. there have been persistent very powerful and very varied (many angles of attack) cases of misinformation about what AI is, does, and what it costs (not just financially wither).

It's being 'sold' as a massive lost leader in the hope of doing the above. Microsoft and Google roughly upper their power consumption (and all the pollution that entails) by 50% since introducing AI's to their portfolios.
When you consider how much they were using before, this is an incredibly impossibly disgustingly (and any other ...ly's) huge by any standards at al. We're talking about the ballpark consumption of a modest sized industrialised country.

I could go on (and usually do, on, and on, and on...) and still not cover all the different aspects of generative AI that are potentially negative, and yet struggle to find the positives that would come close to be worth the damage they're already doing.

And there's one of the cruxes - "generative AI". There are applications for AI that are not nearly as destructive and yet have real world advantages - medical scan analysis on it's own could be massive. Drug discovery's another, and other similar area's in science and technology. But these are not generative AI's swallowing vast amounts of data and resources. Even those have major dangers, such as synthetic virus manufacture, in fact all sorts of weaponry, but you can assured the military are already all over that one, no government's going to ban this stuff.

I've even heard comments that AI can solve the climate crisis! Oh my, "we're doomed, we're all doomed" as Private Frasier used to say with frequent monotony.

<rant rant rave rave growl nash grrrr! etc>

 

[Misty Avich]

Yeah, although the 8086 came before the 8088. Also the 286/386 and I think even the 486 had options with or without a floating point coprocessor (the SX and DX versions).


They are puppets, nothing more. I think it's mostly Hollywood who have given us this idea of humanoid type evil robots who only want to wipe out all humans, so that they then have no purpose and can turn themselves off (or something like that?) because they'd have no purpose any more.
The real horror is the humans who want to make and use them.

I think the worst technology is doing to us is making us too addicted and too reliant on it. But technology has always had that effect. Before the internet most people relied on the television and some couldn't come away from the television. Back in the 70s my mum said that when her dad wasn't working or sleeping he'd be watching the television, on the three channels they had. And he once lived BEFORE the television was common in people's homes. So it's been the same since any technology first started being invented. Many adult humans become reliant and addicted, which doesn't only apply to post-millennial youngsters with cell phones. I bet if our grandparents had that kind of technology in their time, they would have been just as addicted to their phones as us.

Just imagine, it's 1940, and WW2 soldiers are posting pictures of themselves on Facebook, and families and friends are connecting to each other via Skype or Zoom, and thousands of YouTube videos getting uploaded on to YouTube of London being bombed. It would have been exactly that if they had this same technology back then.

So really, people have always been the same, but it's just what we have that changes us, no matter what era it is. If modern technology we have today was invented back in 1750, people then would have been exactly like we are now. But because they didn't have the luxuries and privileges we have today (well, most of us) they had to make do with other ways, with only what they knew.

Mind you, saying that, I was watching a YouTube video the other day of footage of high school kids from each decade (from the 1920s to the 2010s), and I must admit the body language and everything of the kids back in the earlier ones seemed a lot different. They seemed more disciplined and mature, like little old men and ladies coming out of the school lol.

 

[Boogs]

It's a good point, and I think you're right, but that means that realising this becomes more important the more addictive it becomes, but the nature of addiction makes that increasingly less likely.
I'd likely be the same if I wasn't how I am. My family were one of the last to get a TV, and the last to get colour, but it opened up a door of wonders sometimes in a world so much more limited in terms of information availability. But I haven't watched TV for decades now (apart from visiting someone who has their TV on) and actually find video bothersome to watch, sometimes a lot. I hate social media, the though of giving myself over to an AI makes me want to vomit - I'll do it myself badly, thanks very much ChatGPT!

 

[AuAL]

Just a data point on the “my first computer” thread. It wasn’t my first computer, but I had, and still have, a DEC Rainbow 100. This had a motherboard with BOTH an 8088, AND a ZX80. Which OS you booted up in depended on which floppy you had in the drive.

 

[AuAL]

So really, people have always been the same, but it's just what we have that changes us, no matter what era it is. If modern technology we have today was invented back in 1750, people then would have been exactly like we are now. But because they didn't have the luxuries and privileges we have today (well, most of us) they had to make do with other ways, with only what they knew.

I was watching “Bargain Hunt” on TV last night, and one of the items shown was a hand-painted, porcelain, miniature portrait of a young girl. The antiques “expert” likened this to a “selfie” that a father could carry around with him on his travels to remind him of his daughter.

 

[Boogs]

Just a data point on the “my first computer” thread. It wasn’t my first computer, but I had, and still have, a DEC Rainbow 100. This had a motherboard with BOTH an 8088, AND a ZX80. Which OS you booted up in depended on which floppy you had in the drive.

That reminded me of my very first 'PC' - I got a $120 expansion card for my Commodore Amiga (far superior computer to the PC imho) that allowed it to boot up as a PC running DOS, and with a whole meg of RAM, no 640K limit! (although the extra was configured as 'high' RAM so for drivers etc. not programs).
This was when you'd be lucky to get a PC for under a grand. Amazing value!

 

[MildredHubble]

Commodore Amiga (far superior computer to the PC imho)

It was undeniably superior. Unfortunately, Commodore didn't really bother to innovate on the design and the advancement in VGA graphics in the early to mid 90s soon left the Amiga stuck with a chip set stuck in the 80s. The rushed AGA chip set couldn't compete and despite the efforts of a few engineers at Commodore who knew the Amigas days were numbered if they didn't create a viable competitor, Commodore kept trying to sell the same old hardware into a market that had moved on.

 

[AuAL]

There was a suggestion at one stage, from an Amiga fan in the laboratory where I was working that, based on the “advantages” (particularly in terms of graphics) of the Amiga, we should switch from the IBM PC fleet. I was head of the IT support division at the time. (I had a staff of three, and we did hardware and software support for all PCs on site - over 200 of them - systems and applications support for multiple DEC and HP mini-computers, and maintained all network communications. We went on to implement the first SGI parallel server in Australia, and manage a Cray XMP-EL, but those are stories for another day.) The “superiority” of the Amiga fell before the corporate computing environment and support available through sticking with IBM. Sorry about that.

 

[Boogs]

I think the other problem for Commodore was they never targeted Business needs as effectively as IBM and Microsoft did together. I saw MS Word & Excel and the later MS office bundle as being one of the primary factors in pushing the PC into the leading personal computer. In fact it was reckoned, or so the rumour mill said at the time, that MS willingly allowed piracy for a good while to boost their saturation of the market. Basically a lost leader until they felt they had a large enough slice of the market to start doing licensing audits, and boy did the capital start coming in then!

Technically better often equals commercially less profitable. Remember Betamax video tape? (Oh god, showing my age! ).