Writings on AI from 17 years ago....

On Mon, May 31, 2021 at 11:27:40AM +0000, P Gebhardt via cctalk wrote: I really wonder how things related to old tech / engineering are being done in the world. I think certain things need to be financed by someone who has a steady income and can afford to have a decades-long mission to do this or that, usually for the good of humanity. So, private persons are unfortunately out, and museums which depend on donations from private persons are in the picture as long as they can have attention from wealthy sponsors. Other possible curators for something which should last more that individual life are governments and... churches. While of course governments are corrupt and churches are satanic (or the other way around), but so are wealthy donors (both ways)... I think it is very rare that a person is both engineer (working engineer, hobby engineer, someone who makes things from dead matter rather than from other people like mba-s and hr-s do) and wealthy enough to fund a museum from his own pocket. As I see, majority of folks here is from US and the only thinkable option is wealthy engineer. The rarest creature on this pitiful planet, and very short living. Think about it. How many cathedrals would have been built if the building process was in the hands of merchants (or politicians - but fortunately there were also kings when most of cathedrals were being built, so a politician, and a bishop, could have their heads severed off and those were good times) ? Ten years later, all stones sold to biggest bidder. Perhaps to their own relatives. Perhaps collectors on this list should rethink their options. Maybe start a church. -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com **