Years ago, I remember sitting in a professor’s office. There were stacks and stacks of textbooks, shelves of more textbooks lining the walls. I felt like he had more books than a library.

In those days, I was a master’s student in the course option, looking to try to switch to the thesis option so I could do real research into the thing I thought was really cool, which was neural networks. In those days, AI was still a niche field of science, and connectionism (later called deep learning), the subset that neural nets fell under, was full of eccentric personalities committed to the beautifully foolish endeavour of trying to take our limited understanding of the algorithm of the brain and turn it into something grand and wonderful.

I somehow, back in those days, convinced the professor to take me on as a student, even though neural nets were just the last line on his list of other, at the time, more respectable research interests.

AI back then was very different from what it is now. I feel a sense of incredible sadness at what things have become, possibly also some rage. What was a profoundly interesting scientific endeavour has turned into this giant buzzword and megalithic all-devouring capitalism machine.

I was there before all the hype. Trying to do cool things before it was cool. Back when it was science! And clever engineering, and a bunch of math I didn’t really understand at the time. I remember when the Machine Learning Reddit was a place for random enthusiasts to discuss silly side projects, when papers came out every few weeks, rather than several every hour like now.

AI used to be, used to mean, something else. At least, to me it did. Maybe you could argue the goal was always this. But I think, people like Turing, like Simon, like Minsky, they’d be appalled at what people call AI now.

I mostly didn’t stay in contact with my supervisor after I graduated. He is a kind man who gave me a lot of leeway to finish my thesis despite many delays. I still have the copy of the Machine Learning textbook he gave me as a gift when I successfully defended the thesis, to replace the one I’d borrowed from him and returned earlier.

I kinda miss the days when things were heady and full of promise and potential. The world seems like it’s gone insane. I miss when I was just part of a beautifully foolish endeavour (yes, I know that’s also the title of Hank Green’s apparently fabulous book). I just…