{"id":6348,"date":"2023-05-17T09:39:58","date_gmt":"2023-05-17T13:39:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dahlman.online\/?p=6348"},"modified":"2023-07-13T11:25:03","modified_gmt":"2023-07-13T15:25:03","slug":"artificial-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dahlman.online\/index.php\/2023\/05\/17\/artificial-intelligence\/","title":{"rendered":"Artificial Intelligence"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Terror<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

You might remember from your school days.  It\u2019s the \u201cterror\u201d of the blank sheet, or blank \u201cWord document 12\u201d on your computer screen.   In school, there was an essay to write, or a report to create, or a word problem to describe.  The blank page was waiting; cursor unwaveringly blinking.  Waiting for you to pour out you \u201ccogent\u201d thoughts.  Whether you exercise the \u201cancient art\u201d of writing in cursive, use the more modern \u201cqwerty\u201d keyboard, or even dictate your thoughts to a word processor, the \u201cterror\u201d is still the same.  You have to fill the page, and make sense, and \u201ccomplete the assignment\u201d.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each method has its own process.  I remember listening to my father as he used a \u201cDictaphone\u201d for his secretary to transcribe later.  \u201cDear John, comma\u201d he would start, \u201cI\u2019m so pleased to hear of your recent promotion to Vice President, period.  What a well-deserved advancement, comma,  after your great deal with Proctor and Gamble, period. Give my best wishes to Barb and the kids, period. Sincerely, comma, Don\u201d.  Dictation had it owns rhythm and beat, punctuated by the \u201cnuts and bolts\u201d of periods and commas.  I guess it was better than Dad writing on a legal pad.  His poor secretary would never be able to decipher his right-handed scribble.  Writing must be a genetic trait, except my scribble is left-handed making it even more obscure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Turtle<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

We all learned in high school the \u201coutline\u201d method, first building a skeleton framework of ideas, then filling in the words and sentences.\u00a0\u00a0That never worked for me, even through seventy pages of my Masters thesis.\u00a0\u00a0As my \u201cEnglish 101, writing workshop\u201d professor at Denison University, Tony Stoneburner, told me:\u00a0\u00a0some build a structure and hang their sentences on them, others create a shell that surrounds their thoughts, and fills the void in between.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0I am a \u201cturtle\u201d writer, I fill the shell of the essay.\u00a0\u00a0My process is to just sit down and write, driven by the blinking cursor and the thoughts pressing out of my head.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I find that once I begin, the words flow so quickly, that I can\u2019t physically \u201cwrite\u201d in cursive fast enough, legible or not.\u00a0\u00a0Luckily my typing skills are strong.\u00a0\u00a0They keep up with the torrent, at least when things are going well.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thinking<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

I find that writing about something is akin to thinking about it.\u00a0\u00a0I clarify how I consider things by describing them \u201con paper\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0When I reach conclusions, sometimes even surprising ones, it’s part of the process of getting them \u201cdown\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0Sometimes the \u201cshell\u201d changes as the words flow out.\u00a0\u00a0Once in a while, I end at a very different place than I intended when I typed the first sentence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am approaching 1500 essays on Our America, one thousand, five hundred times I\u2019ve \u201cthought through\u201d my ideas in the past seven years.\u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s almost a million and a half words, written at my desk or the kitchen table, tapped on my phone in waiting rooms or even sitting in a hospital bed, on picnic tables in campgrounds or crunched in a car seat or on hotel balconies overlooking the ocean or the pool.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And now, all of that is threatened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Laws of Robotics<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

No, not MY writing: I\u2019ll continue to trudge on unaided, except for the occasional \u201cGoogle\u201d fact check and reference to an online Thesaurus.  But our science and technology is offering a whole new way of expressing thought \u2013 but not our own.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my college days I used science fiction reading as an outlet from the intensity of courses like Nuclear Weapons Theory, Constitutional Law, and War and Revolution of the Twentieth Century.\u00a0\u00a0I read most of the \u201cRobot\u201d series by Isaac Asimov, written in the 1950\u2019s.\u00a0\u00a0Asimov created a whole species of mostly humanoid robots, driven by their \u201cpositronic\u201d minds, and governed by the \u201cThree Laws of Robotics\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n