Chapter 3
How We Got Here

Beingraised in the Midwest in a major college town, I have been in aunique position when it comes to understanding the rise of personaluse of computers in in the global society.
Myfirst hands on experience with a computer was in 1976 at age 15. Itwas an IBM terminal system gifted to our high school by the localuniversity. A group of 5 of us spent every few minute on the system,searching every computer at the university. All that was needed was alogin name. Passwords weren't a thing yet. After 8 weeks and runningup thousands of expensive computer time, the university removed theterminal. But I had been bitten by the technology bug. We evenconvinced an advance math teacher to start a very basic programmingclass after school.
Oneof the first things you learn is that a computer, any computer, isjust about the dumbest device created. Before being programmed, itjust sits there like a paperweight. And it does ONLY what it is toldto do exactly as it is told to do it. It does only and exactly whatit is programmed to do. Computers do not think, they cannot think.They can compute, they can calculate at an incredible rate of speed.And they are confident of their answers, even when wrong.
TheAI industry uses outdated distractions with things like Turing Testswhile basing their "intelligence" on blind memorization ofsources like Wiki and Reddit. But they do not understand themeanings. A toaster and Leonardo da Vinci are equally meaningful tothe way AIs collect data. They use LLMs (large language models),which at the speed that computers can calculate now anticipateeach following word, making a best guess without having no idea whatthe actual question you ask means. A toaster and da Vinci hold thesame weight. AI simulates answers but couldn’t escape a paper bagwithout step-by-step instructions.
GIGOwas a term I learned in the late 70's - and it is more important nowmore than ever. It stands for "Garbage In, Garbage Out",meaning that any computer program is only as smart or stupid as theperson or group that programs it. If you put garbage data in, youwill get garbage data out.
Backwhen we were building our own bootleg PCs, the BIOS chip waseverything. It is the "Basic Input Output System" (BIOS)that determined how well, how correct the computer worked. The holygrail was the IBM PC, and once the Phoenix BIOS came out - we couldmake working units that were virtually identical to the IBM PC.
Butbefore the Phoenix BIOS, there were all kinds of BIOS versions thatlaid bare the GIGO concept. The computer may boot up, but when youran a spreadsheet sometimes calculations would not be correct. When1+1 = 5, it is truly garbage out.
Jumpforward 45 years and now we have AI that claims Jamaica is a resortor that "George Jefferson" was the first President of theUnited States. This is because computers cannot think. The can beconfidently stupid.
Andit is unfortunate that the media uses the term "hallucinate",which implies an actual thought process. Computers have NO capacityto think, there is zero thought process involved. They only doexactly as instructed to do, step by step, which needs to beprogrammed perfectly otherwise software bugs arise. Or software"features" when referring to Microsoft Windows.