moon traveller herald

  INFINITE FEEDBACK LOOP OF TIME - With regenerative and frequency modulation circuits in the early and mid 20th Century, Edwin Howard Armstrong employed feedback to great effect. The improvement in fidelity between AM and FM radio being Armstrong’s greatest achievement. One could say Armstrong took a cue from mechanical and electrical thermostats that had evolved over the previous 100 years. The work on the thermostat arguably morphed into the autopilot. All these feedback-based inventions spurred scientific thought, and the birth of Cybernetics under the tutelage of Wiener, McCullough and others. Overtime, Feedback loops were understood as essential to how natural and artificial systems were regulated to maintain stability. Ultimately, with the term ‘Cybernetics’ well in the rear-view mirror, researchers followed feedback to form the basis for recurrent Neural Networks’ use in Natural language processing.  The neural nets’ ability to analyze sentences and predict the next wo...

A technology that is to succeed in the market - overhyped or not - needs a name that can be infused with aspiration, can be a receptacle for desire. Cloud computing blithely surpassed "grid" and "utility computing" because cloud could hold anyone's dream. Today's out-of-the-box solution "AI" (which took over in the popular press from GenAI and ChatGPT) fits that bill. I had a chance to speak with a prominent politician at the city level. Let's say the matter under discussion was a problem such as graffiti on gravestones or ajar manhole covers. No matter. The word "AI" came up. Helpful to collaboration. Maybe in some instances. The politicians' problem is that they "can't hire enough people to do all that needs to be done" and are looking for AI [read: GenAI] to improve collaboration and productivity.  So naturally they are receptive to the claims of somewhat imminent AI innovation. If I talked with a VC just about be...

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is right up there with the MidEast, Ukraine, Democracy, Inflation and Kim Kardashian among the memes that we see in our news feeds today. *On Wall Street, AI hopes drove a big boost in the stock market. People are going to lose jobs and machines are going to take over and we can rake in some bucks: Hurray!  *For my brother, it’s a quick “Belated Birthday Card source” [Hell with Hallmark]  *For headline writers, AI fever has been a chance to get clicks, hits and page views based on FUD - Fear Uncertainty and Doubt.  *For an older writer, [me] AI nudges one forward, raining down ideas when his own synapses are flagging .*&%!  I spent over 40 years in the computer trade ‘press’ – as the Web took over it was called ‘media’. I wrote was about what was inside these boxes. The Definition of computer is 1-input, 2-processing, 3-output – all of which is enabled by 4-memory. The last 5 years before I retired I had the Big Data beat. That w...