Satrurday Memory for ASugust 15, 2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was 1956. I was a freshman at USC. I had a work-study job in the Computer Science Laboratory. USC had just received shipment of the IBM 305 RAMAC computer consisting of many modules taking up a whole room. It was IBM’s newest main-frame. My job was punching data into punch cards, loading paper into the printers, putting labels on tape canisters from the tape drives, and other such tasks. Some of the people that were in the lab were consultants from the Rand Corp[oration, whose headquarters was in close-by Santa Monia. I was invited to join them for lunch-time discussions. Among things discussed were artificial intelligence (AI). The term was not yet generally known, having been coined only the year before by John McCarthy, a mathematician at Dartmouth. But even before the word was coined, Rand Corporation was working on the mathematical and computer tools that were making artificial intelligence possible and manifest. A good bit of this was happening in the USC lab. Rand was one of the few places that was working on AI in the world. One thing that stands out in my memory is what one of the consultants told me. He aid, “Pay attention to AI. Do not ignore it.” I wish I had paid more attention . In many ways I was there where and when AI was born. I did not have the presence of mind to really understand the implications. Years later, in 1969, I was a professor at UC Santa Barbara. I was in the lab when the first ARPANET was executed between UC Santa Barbara, UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, and the University of Utah. This was the first physical manifestation of what later became the “internet.” I was there. Again, I did not have the presence of mind to foresee what it was that was being born. In 1972, while I was in training to be a Jungian Analyst, I had a dream referring to these two aspects of my earlier life. The dream called me an “uncomprehending witness.” That, I cannot deny.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Satrurday Memory for ASugust 15, 2026 It was 1956. I was a freshman at USC. I had a work-study job in the Computer Science Laboratory. USC had just received shipment of the IBM 305 RAMAC computer consisting of many modules taking up a whole room. It was IBM’s newest main-frame. My job was punching data […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coming-soon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2310"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2311,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2310\/revisions\/2311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}