While I wholeheartedly agree with the major sentiment expressed in this piece, I however find a couple of statements troubling.The statement that “Silicon valley was built by philosophers who learnt to code” is highly misleading at best, and at worst, just plain wrong.
Silicon valley is not the proper name of that area of California. Its proper name is Santa Clara valley, and prior to becoming the technology capital of the world, it was the world’s largest fruit producing and packing area.
The nickname Silicon valley did not come from coders like Mark Zuckerberg in the early 21st century, or even coders like Bill Gates and Larry Ellison (founder of Oracle) in the mid 1970s but from activities from largely 2 groups of people in the 1950s and 1960s.
The first group consists of William Shockley and his assistants Bardeen and Brattain who were scientific researchers at the illustrious Bell Labs, the research arm of America’s premier telecommunications company AT&T. At Bell Labs they invented the transistor around 1953 and were rewarded with the Nobel prize in physics for their efforts.
Shockley would eventually leave Bell Labs and found Fairchild Semiconductors. This was the seminal firm that would birth many firms that would lead Santa Clara valley to become known as Silicon valley, including the 2nd major group i referred to earlier.
One of Shockley’s employees was a man named Robert Noyce. He and 7 other colleagues, most notable among them being Gordon Moore and Andy Grove, would leave Fairchild and start the company we all know as Intel.
At Intel, Noyce would invent the microprocessor, which is essentially billions of transistors miniaturized and etched onto a silicon chip.
The men in the 2 groups had phd level knowledge of fields like solid state physics and physical chemistry. These men were formally trained in the hard sciences/engineering. They certainly wouldn’t have seen themselves as philosophers.
Even describing them as coders, such that the uninformed might think that learning php or python and building an android app that lets you pay nepa bills or order pizza is work on the same order of complexity as the work these men did, does their pioneering efforts absolutely no justice at all.
The 2nd statement I have a problem with is that which says “China uses history to define its national purpose for AI”. It sounds like what 20th century physicist Wolfgang Pauli would have described as “not even wrong”. I might have to explain that.
According to Pauli there are 3 kinds of statements and here they are ranked from best to worst:
statements that are right
statements that are wrong and
statements that are not even wrong.
No1 are statements that are very precise and proven to be right. No2 are statements that are very precise and proven to be wrong. No3 are statements that are sufficiently vague that they can be stretched to mean almost anything and thus end up at least sounding somewhat right in just about every situation.
In closing, I want to reiterate that I agree whole heartedly with the main thrust of this piece. In fact i myself have been forced to make the same arguments prior to this piece appearing.
It would be very wrong to call for the arts and humanities to be abandoned just because we are in the age of AI. At the same time however it would be just wrong to make claims for the arts/humanities that dont stand up to scrutiny.
