I may still be hobbling for my motorcycle accident a month ago, but I can sit, test circuits, and rewire. While I have been concerned with repairing myself, a beautiful autumn day, was too much to resist. I put on some old jeans and rugby shirt, both bearing stains from run in with grease, oil, and gas, pulled up the Puccini playlist and made myself comfortable before the old fuse box on the vintage Triumph Spitfire I bought in college 49 years ago.
Sun, sand, and saltwater are good for the soul, but the mental challenges of matching wiring diagrams to reality can be as mentally refreshing as solving a math or crossword puzzle. Decades of intermediate medaling make the task anything but straightforward. The parsing, surgical dissection, and reconnections required exercise visual acuity and fine motor skills. I'll confess that there is something sensual about feel of electrical tape pulled and wound taught, and a thrill at seeing old circuits come to life.
Jokes about post WWII British electronics aside, my Spitfire's circuits have aged well, especially given the years she sat on the seawall of Navy bases while I flew, and the years in Texas and Colorado where temperature extremes were the norm. While working I thought about artificial intelligence and how it might age. The semiconductors making up the billions of connections in nodes and layers in artificial intelligence neural networks are often exposed to high operating temperatures and strong electric magnetic fields.
These forces can cause circuits to age prematurely. While my old analogue Spitfire circuits have weathered time well, what might happen if artificial intelligence networks age prematurely, leading to delusions and errors.
Will our AI programs grow cranky and many seniors do? Will AI suffer its own forms of dementia? Depending on what we turn over to AI the results could vary from amusing to catastrophic. The aging and degradation semiconductors and other components in electric circuits also hold potential perils for military and intelligence technologies that were early adopters of digital over analogue systems and systems that incorporate AI.
