"Why are Computers So Much Slower Than In YOUR Day, Daddy?"

Tech Review:
WSJ.com - Portals By LEE GOMES

A Back-Cover BrushWith a High-Tech SeerAnd Some of His Pals: October 5, 2005


"While I recall once hearing something about not judging a book by its cover, I couldn't help but be bothered by some of the suppliers of blurbs on the back of the new Ray Kurzweil book, "The Singularity Is Near."

Mr. Kurzweil is well-known in technology circles as a flag waver for the "strong" school of artificial intelligence, or AI. This is the belief that future computers won't just become increasingly powerful but also increasingly like people.

The theme has been an enduring one for Mr. Kurzweil, who claims street cred on the topic because of his prior work as a computer scientist and inventor. An earlier Kurzweil book talked about "spiritual" machines. This new one promises fully human-like computers in 20 or so years.

But that's just the warm-up, the amuse bouche. By 2045, predicts Mr. Kurzweil, human and computer intelligence will merge -- the "singularity" of the title -- and become some grand new form of life, one that will then venture out into the universe.
It will be like the end of "2001," I suppose, though without the Richard Strauss soundtrack.
The first of the off-putting book blurbs comes from Marvin Minsky, the godfather of strong AI. As a consultant during the filming of "2001" during the 1960s, Prof. Minsky made predictions about how common HAL-like machines would be in 30 years. You know how this story ends: Computers can still barely open a printer port, much less the pod bay doors."

Precisely. There was a wise old man who watched 2001 A Space Odyssey with me, chortling throughout the movie about how marvelous the imagination could be, and how dumb the hands-on common sense was. Hard to find one mindset...and a movie is a collaboration that has found it's mindset...that features what can be as well as what should be. Spacestations will never have the spacious accommodations that Kubrick and Clark brought to mind, and of course computers got smaller, not bigger, so they had the future quite reversed, and were it not for the music and special effects, the movie would be even less fondly remembered through the tempering of hindsight. Critics hated it back then, most folks found it boring, but the single rallying cry of both was the idea that it was a portal to the future and we should revel in it because of that precious, never before seen glimpse of what was to come.

Bullshit. Everything was flat out wrong and so what's new. Computers today don't do anything different from 30, or 40 years ago, save for the speed by which they crash or lose whatever the important thing was we were working on. Smaller indeed but still dumb-ass adding machines. The event that the industry, the world, and the end user have all been waiting for isn't even on the horizon let alone the drawing board, because that event is the brilliant quantum leap that changes everything, and all we get are new versions of Windows that need more and more memory to do the basic tasks, and we DO need the memory because opening AOL for example, means wading through so very many graphic-heavy advertisements that a gig is barely sufficient anymore.

I won't dwell on how America On Line has become more insidious than the spam and adware we so detest, but I DO remember when logging on took 4 megs of memory and a 2400 bps modem to do what a hundred times that number cannot do anywhere near as well today.

And it'll get worse, not better. Blaring, glaring "buy-me's" will be the rage forever and a day, and just wait until they have the capability to home in on you while you're OFFLINE. Because THAT is what they're working on, that is what they want, and we trust personal computers LESS today than yesterday because of what they've done to the process.

Take the time to read the entire article, for it is well written and makes sense and that in and of itself is a bonus nowadays.