So whats going to happen...

[1nvest]

Global Thermonuclear Warfare by any chance?

How long before a more intelligent entity ponders the best way to save the Earth

I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realised that you aren’t actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we... are the cure [Smith/Matrix]

[1nvest]

HAL ... 2001 Space Odyssey were the pre-letters of IBM
NT were the subsequent letters of MS
AI ... subsequent letters are BJ

... a ring of potential chaos.

Here's the thing.
It's not funny if you have to explain it...
..and I really think you need to here

PM

[servodude]

Here's the thing.
It's not funny if you have to explain it...
..and I really think you need to here

PM

Ok that's worth a rec..
...off you go

Have fun

[mc2fool]

HAL ... 2001 Space Odyssey were the pre-letters of IBM
NT were the subsequent letters of MS
AI ... subsequent letters are BJ

... a ring of potential chaos.

WNT is the subsequent letters of VMS, both having been built by Digital Equipment Corp's chief OS architect Dave Cutler, who was grabbed by Gates from DEC to MS and took a chunk of developers with him.

"Many users believe that NT's developers carried concepts from VMS to NT, but most don't know just how similar NT and VMS are at the kernel level (despite the Usenet joke that if you increment each letter in VMS you end up with WNT­ - Windows NT)."
https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vms-rest-story

[dionaeamuscipula]

Computational chemistry is already being used in drug discovery, using techniques which I suspect are virtually identical to those used in the example above. I think (but I don't know, in fact I don't really know anything about this stuff beyond listening to a couple of low level talks by university chemistry departments) that AI is a big word here, lots of things are being described as "AI" when in reality they are nothing of the sort, but calling them AI releases funds that aren't triggered by boring old but large scale modelling.

DM

AI is getting a bit "buzzy" these days
At one level I was doing AI 30 years back in my PhD ('machine listening using generic algorithms for heuristic analysis")
which meant we didn't have to explain what the computer was looking for... but we couldn't talk to it as if it was a twat in the pub... ...and it wouldn't lie to us in a plausible way either.
I've done loads of stuff since that extracts patterns in a heuristic way from data without getting my knickers twisted because it was trendy.
Can we please just be let alone to get on with it?

Ha! Meanwhile - or at least not *that* much earlier, and I suspect not *that* far away, I did all of the Computing part of my degree course on punch cards.

DM

[James]

HAL ... 2001 Space Odyssey were the pre-letters of IBM
NT were the subsequent letters of MS
AI ... subsequent letters are BJ

... a ring of potential chaos.

Point of order... Windows NT (WNT) was named because the letters followed VMS, the OS for Vax minicomputers that it sought to replace. This was collateral of course. Officially it stood for Windows New Technology.

[swill453]

Point of order... Windows NT (WNT) was named because the letters followed VMS, the OS for Vax minicomputers that it sought to replace.

As stated two posts above...

Scott.

[tjh290633]

Ha! Meanwhile - or at least not *that* much earlier, and I suspect not *that* far away, I did all of the Computing part of my degree course on punch cards.

DM

Back in 1956 I was using a Hollerith Tabulator to calculate crystal structures, during my Part 2 in Chemistry. Another worker was using punched cards to input into the Deuce computer at NPL, working out the structure of Vitamin B12. He had an hour, every Thursday morning at 2am. Then back with the results on more punched cards, ready for the next round of calculations.

We also had the use of such advanced equipment as Monroe and Facit calculators.

TJH

[ReformedCharacter]

HAL ... 2001 Space Odyssey were the pre-letters of IBM
NT were the subsequent letters of MS
AI ... subsequent letters are BJ

... a ring of potential chaos.

Point of order... Windows NT (WNT) was named because the letters followed VMS, the OS for Vax minicomputers that it sought to replace.

Not according to Dave Cutler:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi1Lq79mLeE

Forward to 1:10:30

It has been suggested that Dave Cutler intended the initialism "WNT" as a play on VMS, incrementing each letter by one.[10] However, the project was originally intended as a follow-on to OS/2 and was referred to as "NT OS/2" before receiving the Windows brand.[11] One of the original NT developers, Mark Lucovsky, states that the name was taken from the original target processor—the Intel i860, code-named N10 ("N-Ten").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT

Which is pretty much what Cutler says.

RC

[mc2fool]

Point of order... Windows NT (WNT) was named because the letters followed VMS, the OS for Vax minicomputers that it sought to replace.

Not according to Dave Cutler:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi1Lq79mLeE

Forward to 1:10:30

It has been suggested that Dave Cutler intended the initialism "WNT" as a play on VMS, incrementing each letter by one.[10] However, the project was originally intended as a follow-on to OS/2 and was referred to as "NT OS/2" before receiving the Windows brand.[11] One of the original NT developers, Mark Lucovsky, states that the name was taken from the original target processor—the Intel i860, code-named N10 ("N-Ten").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT

Which is pretty much what Cutler says.

RC

And I saw an interview with him back in the late '90s in which his response to WNT being VMS+1 was just to smile and silently refuse to comment.

[GrahamPlatt]

Look, I don't pretent to understand any of this stuff....but I take more than a passing interest.

There seems to be 2 major technologies 'on the brink' so to speak (going by the general press - which probably means they're some way ahead of what they actually tell us (and going by the shennanigans at Open AI recently, maybe that's true)

1. Artificial General Intelligence via Open AI/ChatGPT and others

and

2. Quantum Computing - IBM and others are (apparently) making great strides in this area.

The 2 seem related to me (maybe they're not?)

But let's say they crack both fairly soon....what does it mean if they marry them together? Exponential growth in machine learning - exporing possibilities in seconds? Solving the greatest problems of mankind in the blink of an eye? A huge uptick in efficiency, growth? A massive increase in living standards across the globe?

Or......?

Looks like the World Economic Forum are on the same page

https://decrypt.co/212408/ai-and-quantu ... -risks-wef

[Hallucigenia]

Quantum is still probably 3-4 years away from its "ChatGPT" moment, but it's certainly getting to the stage where prototypes are starting to be capable of useful things. The big thing is that it's hard to keep them fed, connectivity/bandwidth is a big problem for quantum computers. So they're much better at tightly defined maths problems like cryptography and crystal structures than they are at problems that need big datasets like weather forecasting or protein folding.

See this from Microsoft's main quantum architect (and also read around the MS quantum blogs, they're doing a lot of work in developing basic tools and middleware) :
https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/quantu ... -and-hype/