i’m joshua, an engineer, designer, + entrepreneur. i write about what i’m learning, what i’m questioning, + how we make complicated things a little more useful.
almost twenty years in tech. plenty left to figure out.
i did not deactivate my accounts. i did not take a break. i deleted them. i could never sign back in. i closed my facebook, my instagram, my twitter, everything, + with it: all my connections, conversations, + content since freshman year in high school. for some people i know, this was a quarterly routine, but for me, my social media had served as an archive of me. it served as a record-keeper of the different…
i expected AI to make me faster. i didn’t expect it to make me slow down. Google made the world’s knowledge searchable. ChatGPT made it approachable. before AI, i could find information about almost anything, but finding it wasn’t the same as understanding it. search results often dropped me into explanations written for people who already spoke the language. “explain it to me like i’m five” is a common prompt…
the concept of AI is not a new one. like, not at all. Alexa and Siri have existed for decades. childhoods of playing Pac-man and Galaga have been thwarted by aliens and ghosts controlled by AI. IBM’s Deep Blue AI defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997. in fact, the modern idea of “artificial intelligence” has existed over half a century, coined by computer scientist John McCarthy in 1956. so what is…