Re: Don't worry, AI solves all your problems
Funny you should mention this. Just a few days ago I was thinking about how if something like SQL came along today, with all of its power and all of its statistically based optimization routines, then someone would surely insist that this was AI at its finest. But of course that's not true, given that it actually has decades of ordinary programming behind it, with some basic statistical processing thrown in for good measure.
This takes me back maybe 25 years or so ago, where I was attending an IBM presentation about their latest query engines which were behind their SQL product and some of their other, older query products, too. And at one point they popped up a screen which said something like "And this is the point where magic happens!" And indeed it did seem quite a bit like magic at the time. But like I said, just ordinary programming, not AI.
As for staying relevant, at this very moment there is story floating around (maybe even on here) about how something like 40% of "AI" startups don't appear to be really doing anything with AI at all; they're just milking the term for all it's worth. In which case I'd say that IBM has far more legitimate chops than they do.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
