February 3, 2023; Venice Beach, California

It was an amazing day. Life hit a rough patch but I am overwhelmed with gratitude for the people around me and the things I get to experience on a daily basis. I cherish every one of you. I talked to Arnold Schwarzenegger today!! Like had a whole ass conversation, and moments later he barked at me to get back to my workout!! 16 year old me literally died and went to heaven. A lot of change. A lot of uncertainty has me shedding old skin, and becoming the person I want to be in the next chapter of my story. Evolving is not a painless process. Probably why so few people do it. If I have learned anything along the way it is that life doesn’t change if I don’t. This song is beautiful https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWjakbF_vz0 Book Review: Sorry for the crappy picture I already returned the book to the library and this was the only one I had. *RABBIT HOLE WARNING* If you are not familiar with the current state of Artificial Intelligence, this book is interesting. If you are familiar with the current situation, this book is absolutely fascinating. Every A.I. book starts with a catch-you-up on the history of what it is, who discovered it, and a progression of breakthroughs that have brought us to a very wild time.  This is just how books on A.I. begin, all of them. To be fair it really is crazy people have figured out how to make electricity do shitloads of really hard math, but it left me unaware of how old this book was when I read it. I have read dozens of books on A.I. and this one was very understandable. John Haugland used the language available at the time, and in 1985, there was less jargon and zero assumption of prior knowledge. In a nutshell, it turns out that math can do cool stuff, like statistics. Statistics let us make better guesses at whatever we are analyzing. Everything from weather forecasts to the likelihood that someone will buy a particular product is a statistical prediction. So a really smart guy the British government drove to suicide designed a machine that could execute set of instructions using this: That’s really cool. I don’t know what it means in any useful way. But it is where all the writers start these books. So when it finally ended and it was talking about really old stuff I was puzzled. The book is 38 years old! I loved it. It gave me a perspective on how it has taken much longer to get where we are with computers than I thought. But where we are now is literally changing on a daily basis Have you met ChatGPT yet? This is a free chat bot that can do a lot of things. Ga’head! Try it. https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/ Click tryGPT, its free you just have to give it an email address and stuff. Over 100 million people are signed up and you can ask it anything. And I literally mean anything. It will write computer code to build websites and just have a general conversation about life. And it is part of a wild number of tools disrupting pretty much everything. As far as tasks go they are way way way way better than humans. Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea by John Haugeland ends with a statement I super duper love. “We hate to withhold judgment: skepticism is intellectual anemia. (*how awesome is that?!*) How much more fun, more vigorous, more apparently forthright to take sides! Yet, sometimes, the results are just not in.” *chefs kiss* How much more fun indeed. He was unconvinced systems were ever going to achieve what was at the time ironically called GOFAI (Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence). This term is pretty outdated now, hence the irony. Despite this belief he so eloquently expressed hope that he would be wrong. He saw nothing in 1985 that convinced him computers were going to be able to talk like us, learn tasks they never could before, and get better at us in anything we challenge it to. Thank you for staying with me this far if you have. I will end on the statement “skepticism is intellectual anemia”. Skepticism has to be earned. Skeptical is the position you take AFTER you have taken in a reasonable amount of information, checked for biases, and made sure to always consider the fact we may be wrong. All surety must immediately be abandoned in the face of convincing evidence. Professor Haugland passed away in 2010, a few years before the results I think would have convinced him were in.