Pope Leo spoke about AI this week, calling it a Tower of Babel. Just maybe he meant "babble"...
In 1992, when I was hired as the youngest Recycling Program Manager tbda Deputy Division Director at MA DEP in Boston, there was a DOS computer upgrade in progress. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts was in the process of upgrading computers and monitors from green-screen monochrome Caldera DOS generation (will try to remember the word and spreadsheet programs, pre Office...) computers, used mostly for inter-office emails. Many staff would print all of their emails as backup - the "paperless office" was a laughing point then.
I'm a little hazy on what was available for "the internet" then, but I know people were talking about it. Staffer Bob Whitcher (a lowly Republican "political favor appointee" as described by my Dukakis managers) took me to an early internet cafe where they were trying to DSL an America OnLine (AOL) page. Bob was describing this to me as the "future", something that would have an incredible effect on the entire economy. We left before the page loaded. I both understood that Bob was an incredibly undervalued teammate, and at the same time saw that for this particular moment, internet was hype.
I'm also rusty on how exactly I did the research and gathered the data for my first big splash that year, the paper I wrote "Value Added By Recycling Industries in Massachusetts". It was to me a pretty obvious and non-political paper, just showing that recycling's success was not to be measured by the price of scrap at the local recycling depot if tens of thousands of jobs were at recycled paper, metal and glass mills that depended on the feedstock, and made products in competition with virgin material use factories near subsidized natural virgin resources...
Years later, I was able to use the same logic and research skills to present the view of reuse of electronics from the perspective of buyers of the early MA DEP computers from Indonesia (photo from my son there this week), Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, etc. I hadn't driven a truck to those locations, they weren't like the local paper mills adding value on Massachusetts. But like the recycling economy being bashed as "subsidized" which was laughable during the General Mining Act of 1872, the purchase orders for used devices published on Recycle.net lined up with the values offered under Silicon Sam Wasserman's RepairFAQ.
The internet was indispensible to me, to this blog. And AI is probably going to be bigger than the internet, because it will be able to harness Calipari's Powers of Persuasion (another Bob Whitcher introduction).
