Thoughts on AI
Thoughts on AISeptember 8, 2026In the early 1980s, while working for ETA Systems, I got picked to be our representative to Control Data (our parent company)’s working group on AI. At the time, it was all Lisp and Scheme-based “expert systems,” and my assessment was that the hard part was teaching the systems and the danger of the system making connections that were not factually-based, but which sounded very plausible. I never really got any deep understanding, as I saw it as an intractable problem, for a number of reasons, not least of which was liability.
- ▪Thoughts on AISeptember 8, 2026In the early 1980s, while working for ETA Systems, I got picked to be our representative to Control Data (our parent company)’s working group on AI.
- ▪At the time, it was all Lisp and Scheme-based “expert systems,” and my assessment was that the hard part was teaching the systems and the danger of the system making connections that were not factually-based, but which sounded very plausibl
- ▪I never really got any deep understanding, as I saw it as an intractable problem, for a number of reasons, not least of which was liability.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 7,676 of its stories.
Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | davepolaschek |
| Canonical URL | https://write.as/davepolaschek/thoughts-on-ai |
| Publication time | Mon, 05 Oct 2026 17:01:04 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-05T17:17:38.697Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-05T17:17:38.697Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Thoughts on AISeptember 8, 2026In the early 1980s, while working for ETA Systems, I got picked to be our representative to Control Data (our parent company)’s working group on AI. At the time, it was all Lisp and Scheme-based “expert systems,” and my assessment was that the hard part was teaching the systems and the danger of the system making connections that were not factually-based, but which sounded very plausible. I never really got any deep understanding, as I saw it as an intractable problem, for a number of reasons, not least of which was liability.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at davepolaschek.
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