Nick Selby :donor: on Nostr: Today I realized why Wendy M. Grossman was so exasperated during a conversation we ...

Today I realized why Wendy M. Grossman (npub1gsa…q4wj) was so exasperated during a conversation we had in Amsterdam around 1998 or even 1999. We’d both been hired to do regular submissions to an emerging tech magazine (the kind that, in addition to the free food in the company cafeteria, also had a uniformed bartender in the office each day - this was approaching the height of the dot com boom, remember) and I was mentioning something that a Scandinavian company was working on that would seem to be stepping closer to the vision Nicholas Negroponte had put in his book about the MIT media lab in about 1988 or so: the digital assistant that helps you plan your day with details like “You should leave now because traffic is heavier than usual on your route to the office”. Wendy seethed and declared it all pointless masturbation or some equally disparaging take.

Now here I was this morning, reading the codswallop from WWDC about how Apple AI mining my “private cloud” would help me plan around a business meeting and my daughter’s violin recital or some other bullshit, I see now that Wendy had seen the future and declared it stupid 26 years before I could even wrap my brain around it; it was stupid then and is stupid now because even if it works the cost is insane and the benefit really, really dodgy.

Sometimes it takes me a bit to catch up to really smart people.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/06/11/1093577/apple-is-promising-personalized-ai-in-a-private-cloud-heres-how-that-will-work