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AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

rakhim.exotext.com

11–20 of 190 posts

Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

#11
My read is that the author is saying it would have been really nice if there had been a really good protocol for storing data in a rich semantically structured way and everyone had been really really good at adhering to that standard.

Is that the main thrust of it?

Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

#13
I think every field has its own version of this thought, where if we could just manage to categorise and tag things properly we could achieve anything. Our lack of a valid overarching ontology is what is holding us back from greatness.

It might be short lived, who knows, but it's interesting that the recent progress came from capturing/consuming rather than systematically eliminating the nuance in language.

Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

#14
post #7

Expresses a longing for the semantic web. > Remember Semantic Web? The web was supposed to evolve into semantically structured, linked, machine-readable data that would enable amazing opportunities. That never happened. I think the lesson to be learned is in answering the question "Why didn't the semantic web happen?"

>"Why didn't the semantic web happen?" Because web content is generated by humans, not engineers.

But also because companies that produce web content wanted it to be seen by humans who would look at ads, not consumed by bots and synthesized with other info into a product owned by some other firm.

Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

#16

> If all knowledge were stored in a structured way with rich semantic linking, then very primitive natural language processing algorithms could parse question like the example at the beginning of the article, and could find the answer using orders of magnitude fewer computational resources. In vertical markets, can LLMs generate a "semantic web of linked data" knowledge graph to be parsed with efficient NLP algorithm…

Palantir was 90% about ontology creation back when I first used it in 2009. They knew at that point that without some level of structure that mapped to the specific business problem that the data input into the graph was difficult to contextualize.

Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

#17
I'm pretty sure AI _is_ "personal computing".

One can speak in their native language to a computer now and it mostly understands what is meant and can retrieve information or even throw together a scaffold of a project somewhat reliably.

It's not particularly good at writing software, however. Still feels like a human is needed to make sure it doesn't generate nonsense or apparently pretty insecure code.

So I'm not sure the author got the point across that they wished, but aren't vector databases basically a semantic storage/retrieval technology?

Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

#19
I feel like I see this attitude a lot amongst devs: "If everyone just built it correctly, we wouldn't need these bandaids"

To me, it feels similar to "If everyone just cooperated perfectly and helped each other out, we wouldn't need laws/money/government/religion/etc."

Yes, you're probably right, but no that won't happen the way you want to, because we are part of a complex system, and everyone has their very different incentives.

Semantic web was a standard suggested by Google, but unless every browser got on board to break web pages that didn't conform to that standard, then people aren't going to fully follow it. Instead, browsers (correctly in my view) decided to be as flexible as possible to render pages in a best-effort way, because everyone had a slightly different way to build web pages.

I feel like people get too stuck on the "correct" way to do things, but the reality of computers, as is the reality of everything, is that there are lots of different ways to do things, and we need to have systems that are comfortable with handling that.

Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

#20
post #7

Expresses a longing for the semantic web. > Remember Semantic Web? The web was supposed to evolve into semantically structured, linked, machine-readable data that would enable amazing opportunities. That never happened. I think the lesson to be learned is in answering the question "Why didn't the semantic web happen?"

"Why didn't the semantic web happen?"

I have literally been doing we development since their was a web, and the companies I developed for are openly hostile to the idea of putting their valuable, or perceived valuable, information online in a format that could be easily scraped. Information doesn't want to be free, it wants to be paid for. Unless the information shared pulls visitors to the site it doesn't need to be public.

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