Stephen Dubner

So when I first moved to New York, I'd quit playing music.

I was going to graduate school for writing and I didn't have any money.

So I earned money by doing word processing.

It was as big as like a Buick.

It was a massive machine.

You had to put in these big floppy disks for each function.

So it was like the create a file floppy disk, save a file floppy disk, spell check.

But spell check and saving documents, all these things were some version of what we think of now as AI.

It's just basically using compute power to do stuff that we've already known how to do

but do it better and more efficiently.

Is a dictionary not AI?

It's not my intelligence.

I'm looking up what somebody else figured out.

And they get passed on from generation to generation too.

It's a cumulative thing, which is really wonderful.

Like the reason that we don't have to learn calculus to build a microphone is because generations of people did it.

Now we buy it for like $200.

How nuts is that?

So what does that free us up to do?

That's the same question we're asking now about AI.