Not all the SDSU CompSci classes were completely valueless, I will admit, and at least being in that degree program allowed me to meet sci-fi writer (now departed) Vernor Vinge, who signed my copy of A Fire upon the Deep (which I eventually lost somewhere between moves). I took elective classes in #artificial_intelligence and learned some Common Lisp. But most of what I remember of the #compsci curriculum at SDSU in the 1990s was rather faddish, and I expect that's typical of most such curricula. I wasn't getting a well-structured and rigorous academic discipline; I was getting a collection of vocational exercises, learning how to use #programming tools that happened to be popular at the time. So I ended up doing a lot of C++ homework, and in my last term (when I hurriedly took a bunch of CS classes I'd been putting off because I was putting far more effort into my Classics curriculum) I had to do #Java homework, for a required "object-oriented programming" class.

Ah, #OOP. The very acronym suggests a blunder.

It should worry the writers at @newscientist and @SciAm and @ArsTechnica more than it seems to, that nearly ALL of the people they regard as authoritative on the subject of #artificial_intelligence or #AI, who furnish these press outlets with material for reports and editorials, are committed to selling as "AI" the thing known generally as the #LLM or "large language model", which is notably defective in its ability to reason by abstraction.

These devices are tailored to emit statistically likely replies to sentences. So far as I know, they are not designed to analyze language and discern the abstract meanings behind the words in any passage of text. LLMs frequently emit errors which are symptomatic of that lack of abstract understanding of language.

(cont'd)

Why don't the #AI / #LLM boosters talk about creating #life?

It's a curious business. You'd think some cleverpants writer for the @newscientist or @SciAm would write an editorial about this specific perplex: the #software entrepreneurs have been chattering about #intelligence in extraordinary terms but in a way that's peculiarly dissociated from the question of life.

All intelligent beings known are alive. Crows, foxes, cephalopods, monitor lizards, and the occasional human being are known to exhibit the ability to solve complex problems, remember things outside their immediate perception, learn from experience...it's living things which furnish us with our wisdom about the very concept of intelligence.

So what is #artificial_intelligence?

(cont'd)