TT(O)M

Note: The satirical parody below has been reformatted to accommodate the requirements and limitations of this publishing platform. If you would like to view the article in its original format and layout, please refer to: Bite: The Machine That Knows Everything – April 1985 . $2.95 Vol. 9   No. 4 April 1985 Hardware Software Reviews The Fifth Generation Letters Product Spotlight    By Bit Helmers    “Shrinking news down to the smallest unit of computing.” The Machine That Knows Everything TT(M)O unveils the CrAI IntelliCluster — a room-sized oracle that files away every encyclopaedia ever printed and answers back in plain English. The CrAI IntelliCluster in a customer machine room: paired CrAI Supercomputers flanked by See-Dee-See storage drives and the o...

A personal view of the British system — and why education keeps repeating the same response to every new tool I am tackling education from a personal perspective; there is no AI Committee behind this one. I came up through the British world of O Levels and A Levels in the 1980s — secondary school, sixth form and then university. I was a STEM student, taking mathematics (pure and applied), physics, chemistry, biology and computer studies, and where the narrative allows I have drawn on my own experience. I am also focusing on secondary education and above. Primary education should be about building the foundations on which all later learning rests, and I will leave that stage to one side. An old worry with a new name The current anxiety in education is not new. Each time a new cognitive tool appears — one that promises to do some of the mental work we previously did unaided — education reacts in much the same way. It first treats the tool as a threat, and then, often years later, ada...

AI and the enterprise's scattered memory A practical question: what would it take for an organisation to put everything it knows behind a single, trustworthy assistant — and why is that worth doing now? This is written as an article, but it doubles as a position paper for senior leadership. The short version Every large organisation already owns the answer to almost any question an employee might ask. The problem is not that the knowledge is missing; it is that the knowledge is scattered across dozens of systems, thousands of documents, several generations of technology and a good deal of unofficial "shadow" tooling — and no single person, or team, can see all of it. The cost of that fragmentation is measurable. The McKinsey Global Institute's much-cited research found that knowledge workers spend close to a fifth of the working week simply hunting for and gathering information ( McKinsey Global Institute, via Playbook's summary ). IDC has put a price on the ...