How History Shows us AI is a Scam
Every so often people who want to make money from computers come up with a new exploitative technology hailed as making talent redundant.
This is happening right now with AI.
They say: “It’s too big to stop”.
Writers, artists, programmers — all knowledge workers – will be a thing of the past, they say.
But this has happened before. So let’s look at what history tells us will really happen next.
4GL Was the AI of the 1980's
In 1984 a new technology marvel was hawked as magic. You could type a plain English command and get the computer to do a report. They were called 4GL’s.
“4GL’s were created to enable non- programmers to obtain results from computers and to greatly speed up programming”
“We use the term user-friendly … a term is used by almost all 4GL sales personnel, whether or not it is applicable.”
So user-friendly. Just type “select price from sales”. (Link)
Trouble is non-programmers found the plain English required to get a good result from the computer was so tricky…
