Sonoma Hills

I persuaded OilMan to take a lifelong learning course at Sonoma State this time. It was nice to have company on the beautiful drive through the Sonoma County countryside, but he was rendered almost speechless by the course titled: Philospphy, Artificial Intelligence, and Robotics: The ethical challenges.

...and today was only a discussion of 'deep learning' and the difference between weak and strong intelligence. I love philosophical discussions and have no trouble with the suspension of disbelief required for them. OilMan, on the other hand is an engineer but definitely not a philosopher....

Grandson Peter is majoring in Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara with an interest in AI. I can't wait to talk to him about it, starting with the fact that apparently a lot of people in the community object to the name 'Artificial Intelligence' and have proposed A/IS (Artificial Intelligence Systems)   instead. I have a feeling that won't catch on....

Despite my fascination with the subject, I was beset with my own technical problems today. I usually write some notes on the handouts (which I never look at again) but there were no handouts today. Instead there were slides which I couldn't read because I forgot my glasses. I thought I could just take a picture of each one, but my phone was dead because I forgot to turn off the bluetooth. As a last resort, I thought, I could take notes on good old fashioned paper with a pen, but I had planned to write notes on the handouts and didn't bring any paper....

Nevertheless, it was a fascinating class with, as usual, a lot of people asking very smart questions. 

I still left feeling stupid and with a headache....