Artificial Intelligence and Ethics
Plus Two Villages: a Fable, Tech Tales, and the Poetry Corner
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About the Picture
The pictures at the top of these posts rarely have anything to do with the content of the post. Since this blog is Swaine’s World, I try to show some aspects of my world, mostly scenes around my home. This particular one is a shot of Crater Lake, though no picture ever captures its unique blue.
AI and Ethics
The CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, testified before Congress that the government will have to regulate the uses of this new artificial intelligence technology. It’s scary to think of elected officials trying to wrap their minds around AI, but it’s a good sign that there is such universal recognition that this technology can cause great harm and that we need to assess its uses and install some guardrails.
Can some of the guardrails be built into the technology itself? A company named Anthropic thinks so: they are building ethical rules into their chatbot.
Grady Booch has pointed out how serious the threat is.
Meanwhile, for those who think they’d like to build their own chatbot from scratch, some numbers. This one stands out: $1 million: Cost to train a 13 billion parameter model on 1.4 trillion tokens.
Tech Tales
The Tech Tales series is a history of the computer, lightened with semi-fictional dialogs and delivered in bite-sized chunks over the course of 2023. Here’s this week’s offering.
Young Steve Wozniak and his friend Bill are out riding their bikes in the lush Santa Clara Valley that lies at the foot of San Francisco Bay. They pause at the border of their housing development to watch construction on an office building for one of the new tech companies that increasingly dot the valley.
Bill: Well, we won’t be playing in that field any more.
Woz: Yeah. Look at all the space they’ve cleared just for the parking lot.
Bill: My dad says all this area used to be orchards before the tech companies moved in.
Woz: Your family moved here the same year mine did.
Bill: I’m just saying, imagine if we were living here before all these tech companies moved in.
Woz: [Patiently explaining] But Bill, our dads are engineers. We wouldn’t be living here if it weren’t for those companies.
The former orchard land of the Santa Clara Valley was undergoing a transformation. The valley’s orchards that ran from the bay to the hills and at their peak had boasted some eight million fruit trees were being replaced, field by field, by semiconductor companies, mysterious defense contractors, modern office complexes, new streets, and broad parking lots. What was once referred to the Valley of Heart’s Delight was being transformed into Silicon Valley.
That new name that people were using for the region — Silicon Valley — implied that the cause of this transformation was those new firms that kept popping up to build silicon-based semiconductor components for computers and other electronic devices. But that was just one of several factors that made the Santa Clara Valley particularly fertile ground for these tech firms.
First, you have to look to the north of the Valley, to Stanford University in Palo Alto, and to one particular Stanford professor, Frederick Terman. Terman was born famous, the son of Lewis Terman, the Stanford psychologist who popularized the Stanford-Binet IQ test. Young Fred Terman’s interests, though, lay in the hard sciences, and specifically in engineering. He studied electrical engineering under Vannevar Bush at MIT, the same Vannevar Bush who built the National Defense Research Committee for Franklin Roosevelt and backed J. Prespert Eckert and John Mauchly in designing and building ENIAC, the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer. After graduating and before World War II, Terman, now a professor at Stanford, established a laboratory focused on vacuum tubes, the technology used in ENIAC.
After the war, Terman promoted the idea of leasing Stanford property to technology firms, many of them founded by his own engineering students. Stanford Industrial Park opened in 1951, with its first tenant being Varian Associates, a maker of vacuum tubes and other scientific instruments. Soon after, Hewlett-Packard, another scientific and engineering instrument company, moved in, founded by two of Terman’s students. By encouraging his students to start companies and even investing in those companies, by lining up defense research contracts for the university, and by generally fostering a close relationship between Stanford and the growing tech community, Terman made the Valley a tech hub — and is widely known as the Father of Silicon Valley.
So there were Stanford and Terman, but then there was also the Cold War. When the Russians stunned the world by launching Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite, President Eisenhower responded by creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA. The Federal government backed Fairchild Semiconductor and a wind tunnel project in Mountain View, the next town south of Palo Alto. Lockheed, with facilities in Stanford Industrial Park, was another beneficiary of NASA funding. Lockheed had a storied history, building planes before the war that were flown by Wiley Post and Amelia Earhart, and during the war, producing the only US fighter aircraft in production throughout the American involvement. Lockheed Missiles Division moved to Sunnyvale, just south of Mountain View, in 1957. Tech was spreading inexorably south, into the orchard land.
And yes, one factor that brought about Silicon Valley was indeed those semiconductor companies. Although William Shockley’s own pioneering semiconductor company in Palo Alto was not a success, it spawned an entire industry, primarily based right there in the Bay Area. Fairchild Semiconductor was founded by Robert Noyce and seven other refugees from Shockley Semiconductor. Noyce later went off to start Intel, a company that would be deeply involved in the launch of the first personal computers.
There was one more factor whose influence on the growth of Silicon Valley might have been harder to predict. The Valley was a rich community of tech enthusiasts. Ham radio was inordinately popular in the Santa Clara Valley. Frederick Terman may have helped it along with his popular book, Radio Engineering. But the Santa Clara County Amateur Radio Association was formed as early as 1921, and soon an unusual number of Ham radio operators lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. It may also have had something to do with the remoteness of the area from other cities, an idea that’s hard to grasp nearly a century later. But at the time, to get anywhere meaningful, you were looking at a long trip by ship, train, or coach. And the Ham radio bug caught on the the Valley and didn’t go away.
However they got there, this community of tech-savvy amateurs meant that the tech companies emerging in the Valley decades later would find a welcoming culture.
One of those Ham operators was Steve Wozniak, known to his friends as Woz. The son of a Lockheed engineer, Woz got his Ham license in 1961 at the age of eleven, and built his own radio soon after. It was far from his most ambitious project. The following year, he built a tic-tac-toe machine. Woz was emblematic of these Bay Area tech enthusiasts, and like many of them he was fascinated with computers. Arguably more than most. Uniquely, he papered the walls of his bedroom with pin-up pictures of computers.
The tech industry was fast becoming the default employer of Silicon Valley. Not only did it employ engineers, like Woz’s father Frank, but non-technical people also worked for the tech firms, like Clara Jobs — the mother of a student a couple of years behind Woz in school — who did bookkeeping for Varian.
But while there were many factors behind the rise of Silicon Valley, the primary force driving its continued growth was the semiconductor industry, and initially, Fairchild Semiconductor was where all the talent was.
To be continued — next week, same time, same station.
The Poetry Corner
A Facebook faultfinder named Fred
Whose posts we had all come to dread
Logged back in and swore,
“Just one comment more
To announce that I’m leaving this thread.”
From my first collection of verses, cleverly titled First Verses. Yeah, this one’s another limerick. You can download First Verses for free.
Two Villages: A Fable
An elephant wandered into a small village where six blind men lived. Each in turn observed the elephant. The first, feeling its side, proclaimed, “the elephant is very like a wall.” The second, grasping its tusk, judged it to be very like a spear. The third, running his hand along its trunk, thought it very like a snake. The fourth, bumping up against its knee, insisted it was very like a tree. The fifth, touching its ear, was confident that it was very like a fan. The sixth, brushed by its swishing tail, insisted it was very like a rope. And each argued his position fervently from that day forward. So was politics born.
Not far away, another elephant wandered into another village where there were another six blind men. The first blind man, feeling the elephant’s side, proclaimed, “the elephant is very like a wall.” He then carefully documented this observation, describing his approach in detail. The other blind men each followed his procedure carefully and replicated his result. The elephant, they all agreed, is very like a wall. So was science born.
(My spin on the poem “The Blind Men and the Elephant: a Fable” by John Godfrey Saxe.)
Tune in next week for more adventures in tech history and light verse.