Comments on: Time names the computer its person of the year, 1982 https://dfarq.homeip.net/time-names-the-computer-its-person-of-the-year-1982/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=time-names-the-computer-its-person-of-the-year-1982 David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more Sat, 27 Dec 2025 14:32:39 +0000 hourly 1 By: Steve Aubrey https://dfarq.homeip.net/time-names-the-computer-its-person-of-the-year-1982/#comment-57407 Sat, 27 Dec 2025 14:32:39 +0000 https://dfarq.homeip.net/?p=36538#comment-57407 I’ll agree and disagree with Jon. Yes, our phones are computers that happen to make phone calls – and almost everybody has at least one. On the other side, while not wanting to start a war, I think the AI effort can’t maintain the interest (amount of money) being poured into it. It will grow for a while more, peak, crash, and end up being integrated with everything else. It will still be visible – you’ll be able to point at something and say “That’s AI”, but I can’t see it being the all-consuming entity it currently is, continuing into the far future.

I saw an essay recently, comparing the current state of AI with text-based adventure games. That’s a pretty good analogy to prompt engineering. I also consider it completely different than programming, which uses words to direct a computer’s actions. Programming is deterministic – we require the same results given identical inputs and starting conditions. That’s how accounting software works. That’s not how AI currently does things.

]]> By: Jon https://dfarq.homeip.net/time-names-the-computer-its-person-of-the-year-1982/#comment-57406 Fri, 26 Dec 2025 22:41:08 +0000 https://dfarq.homeip.net/?p=36538#comment-57406 The early 80s were a pivotal time for computing and a key moment in its democratisation.

On this side of the Atlantic the BBC had launched its Computer Literacy Project, Acorn’s BBC Micro was appearing in schools across the country and Clive Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum was selling like hot cakes, battling it out in the home market with the C64, Dragon 32 and a host of other now-forgotten contenders.

Looking back with hindsight, it’s not so much the desktop computer which has proved to be transformational in society as the internet and the smartphone which came in their wake – things which were science fiction when the Time article was written.

Even 15 years ago, a generation on from the Time article and a decade and a half after the advent of the world wide web, most people were still watching linear broadcast TV, shopping in physical retail stores, reading printed newspapers, commuting to work and meeting their partners through real life – i.e., living a lifestyle that would have been similar to the 1980s.

The internet and the smartphone have now upended all of those things for good or ill. What’s next is presumably another major economic and social transformation to be wrought by AI, which my children are likely to experience much more extensively and intensively than my generation.

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