Lately I've been trawling through some of the books I remember reading, roundabout my pre-teen to early teen years. I've mentioned the Danny Dunn series—somehow I avoided learning about Tom Swift, an earlier boy-genius inventor and star of juvenile adventure books, on whom Danny Dunn must have been based. And now I'm gingerly re-approaching Arthur Clarke, who I used to really like and then really hate. I've been a person of inconsistent tastes.
Speaking of inconsistent tastes, going back to juvenile sci-fi reading has reminded me that, for a while, I was totally into artificial intelligence, machine learning, robot pals, and all the rest of that stuff. Indeed, when I got my Computer Science degree at SDSU in the 1990s, I took specific elective classes in AI, though of course I barely remember anything; I've talked about how even back then I detested myself for screwing up a promising education in the physical sciences and bailing out into playing with computers just because it was something I could do, and I disliked most of my CompSci coursework (I had much more enthusiasm for Latin and Greek studies) but I was still clutching onto that teenage fascination with thinking machines.
Hence I'm puzzled with myself: just why exactly did it all come to seem so hateful? Working at Amazon.com for a few months had something to do with that, but...I dunno. Because we're a hideous mess of a plurality, I'm asking myself if perhaps some unsuspected introject was really the person who wanted to do all the programming and AI work.
~Χαρά