The mighty micro

What Hacker News says

1. ssamuliMay 2019
   Looking at first 5 or so pages, I've read a lot of these. Good stuff but seems very unilateral view on the world and I think could be unhealthy for founders to focus too much on startups.

   Not sure what is the right mix, but some of the most motivating reads for me were:

   - Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

   - iWoz

   - The Soul of a New Machine

   - Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

   - Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary

   - The Mighty Micro: Impact of the Computer Revolution

   - Accidental Empires

   - The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

   - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

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2. arethuzaFeb 2011
   I read pretty much exactly the same prediction in "The Mighty Micro" in the early 80s (intelligent machines. immortality) etc. - which pretty much influenced me to do a CS degree and go into postgraduate AI research.

   Nobody would be more delighted than me if immortality is achieved in 2045 (I'll be 80!) but do I expect it? Not really, nor do I expect effective commercial fusion power either (which also has a habit of being a couple of decades away and has been for the last 60 years).

   [Edit: Note that I do believe that artificial general intelligence is perfectly possible (we do, after all, have a working example) just that it won't happen any time soon.]

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3. arethuzaMar 2016
   As someone who turned 50 this year - immortality being available in 30 years sounds pretty good to me!

   However, I seem to remember a similar argument being made in a book I read at high school, which obviously wasn't yesterday. The Mighty Micro, published in 1979, talked about the imminent creation of UIM's (Ultra-Intelligent Machines) by the 1990s and that these would, naturally, lead to such rapid advancements in healthcare as to give effective immortality.

   http://www.tof.co.uk/stories/page8.html

   [NB Mind you that book did make me rather interested in AI and I did do a CS degree and go on to do post-grad AI research for 6 years up to 1994 where I encountered a far better technology for enhancing intelligence. I can't really be too critical of someone getting this excited, after all I did, eventually somebody is going to do it...].

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4. arethuzaJan 2014
   There were some pretty upbeat predictions for the future of computing in the 1970s - here is a quote from a contemporary review of The Mighty Micro from 1979:

   "Some of his guesses seem based on other popular books: he thought 'ultra intelligent machines could prolong life to age 1000' - ie things which might measure blood or neoplasms, and even repair them."

   http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Mighty-Micro-Microchip-Revolutio...

   [The Mighty Micro was definitely one of the things that motivated me to get into computing and AI research]

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