Independence Day Edition
Who is Simon Penny and how did he foretell our current AI hysteria?
My colleague Simon Penny knew about this confused and irrational "AI" hysteria moment better than anyone. In 2019. That's the year he published Making Sense of Cognition, Computing, and Embodiment
Because it's a holiday weekend, I don't want to bother the Knowledge Capital Index or wake up SXQD2 for their book recs. So I'm going to take the opportunity to plug Simon's book because it appears relevant to almost every conversation I have about "AI" these days. And it seems an appropriate time, Independence Day weekend, to celebrate the insight of an independent thinker like Simon Penny.
Where can I find your review of his book?
I decided today to reprint my original review on Knowledge Capital. Note that I wrote a review of this book originally, pre-pandemic, in 2019 the year that Simon published this book. It's fun to return to it to understand how much he foresaw. In the review, I mention the hype around social data analysis at that time and how the limitation of Boolean operants in gaining true insight on social data was risible. At the time I was researching qualitative data management and modeling intelligent querying of qualitative data as an improved way to handle non-quantitative insights for business intelligence. I was placing bets on NLP as being a key player in that. Funny, what has happened since.
Recommended by LinkedIn
I was blissfully unaware of what OAI was doing. I was aware of their existence but I did not think much of the pipe dream of "Generalized Artificial Intelligence" and never guessed they would pull a Zillow on the whole internet. I was working with very small data sets (and still do; I think that's what most people will do going forwards--STLMs are promising).
What happened next was...
Five Cool Reads will be published as a series on Knowledge Capital from now on. Please consider signing up for the newsletter there.