Extracts from a Diary

The nuclear age left radioactive traces in all modern steel. The LLM age is doing the same to digital content. Some analogies and lessons from that. Radioactive Signature on Steel From around 1945 onwards, in specialised niches and applications, there came up a need for specialised steel — steel that was made from before 1945. You see, after the nuclear tests and detonations, there exists a certain level of diffused background radiation in atmosphere. While these detonations happened in US and Japan, initially, followed by USSR and elsewhere, the radiation spread quickly and to somewhat uniform levels, throughout the world. The typical steel-making process uses atmospheric oxygen. And this background radiation in atmosphere leaks into the steel-making process. All steel made after 1945 has a certain level of radioactive traces (or its radioactive signature) slightly and measurably higher than for steel made before that cut-off. There are a set of highly sensitive, niche applications, w...

“AI is coming for your job!” “Government will need to step in and give a universal basic income (UBI) to everyone!” “There will be mass unemployment and civil unrest!” Or so I keep hearing these days in different groups. I am a bit more sceptical. I am simultaneously hyped about and underwhelmed by AI. Image generated using ChatGPT Some Famously Wrong Predictions We overestimate what can happen in the short run and underestimate what does in the long run. There are predictions from the 1950s, attributed to IBM’s then chairman, estimating the market size of computers to be 5 units. Not 5 million, not 5 thousand. Just 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. IBM, probably in the 1980s, thought it would be mind-boggling if there were a use case of more than 128KBs memory. Bill Gates thought there was little commercial potential for this thing called the internet in 1990s, and predicted the end of spam emails “in two years,” in 2004. The prediction about the internet was echoed by subsequent Nobel laureate in E...