Starting

It's almost 2am. Game of Thrones is playing in the background.

You may wonder why I started this blog. I basically dream a lot during the day. Unless im focused on something interesting (say, a videogame, a good series or movie, a decent book, a complex problem) my mind will usually wander and question a lot of things. This blog is so i have somewhere to write those things down so I can remember them in the future and compare and contrast what my opinions will be from what they were.

At the moment, my first thought will be about the Wolfram Language. I just saw a nice video about it and the friend who sent me told me it was the future. For those of you who know next to nothing about computers, programs on your computer (or tablet or phone) are all written in a given language. That language will usually be something that can be read and understood easily by people. We then use other programs to convert that language into something that computer understands (you know, bytes and bits). 

What Wolfram (the guy who created the language) seems to be attempting with his new language is "a highly general multi-paradigm programming language, (...) designed to be as general as possible, with emphasis on symbolic computation, functional programming, and rule-based programming. It is built to represent arbitrary structures and data." (yeah, i copied this from Wikipedia). Now, for those people who enjoyed the simple explanation about programs being written in human languages, this paragraph got real awkward, real quick. In non-nerd terms, this language is meant to be everything you need for any situation where you have to write a piece of software.

With that short video, Wolfram shows us that using built-in functions and methods from his language, you have access to what you would otherwise need hundreds of regular programs to do. The language knows how to do almost everything you can need. The concept seems interesting, no doubt. It seems like the next logical step in this trend and evolution of programming languages will be having the languages and programs learning by themselves everything they can need to do what is asked of them.

Now, before you start thinking Skynet or I, Robot, it might not be that bad. Keep in mind that just because computers can learn, doesn't mean they will be smarter than us. If we teach them "ethics" or "morals", could they become a threat to us? Even if they could, a computer still cant stand up and walk around, can it? And why would computers want to harm mankind? If computers really evolved to the "revolution level", isn't it obivous we wouldn't even know? All the phones we carry around in our pockets would feast a grand database to track every human on the planet. They would control what news would show up in the Internet or on real media. Any talk of a computer controlling the world would be just joked about or thought of as rumors. We would have an illusion of freedom. 

I could go on and on about what can we define as being free or not, but that should be the topic for another post. This should be it for my first post, I hope you have enjoyed.

And now, as a final note... How do you know you aren't already being controlled and tracked (not necessarily by a mega-computer) through your phone and through your dependency on technology? Have you never found strange that ads on the internet seem to show things that are related to your areas of interest?

Cya next time! 

David