AI and You

Confused or concerned about AI? Artificial intelligence is already causing massive upheavals in the job market for seekers of their first jobs and for experienced workers as well. Massive investments are being made, even in companies who are laying off experienced workers. States are asked to build, or at least allow to be built, multiple data farms which will greatly increase energy and water costs for everyone, and will probably cause water shortages affecting agriculture and the ability to put out fires. There will be construction jobs for building the data farms, but the data farms are probably going to be operated by tiny staffs. Is AI worth it? In particular, is it worth it to you and your community?

This short book is intended for the reader who wants to answer those questions based on facts, rather than just by hype. It will provide you with the ability to answer intelligently and determine if you should invest, divest, or vote differently.

This book, written by a long-time computer scientist, educator, author, and administrator, aims to reach as wide an audience as is possible, given the importance of this topic. Every chapter after the introduction begins with a paragraph or two describing the main points of the chapter, allowing a reader uninterested in technical details to skip to the next chapter. Each chapter also lists some search words you can use for further reading.

The book is not intended to be a guide to use any particular AI product. We'll discuss some previous AI and computer chip successes and failures, to help guide our discussion. No mathematical or programming knowledge is required.

About the Author

I recently retired from being a professor of computer science at Howard University for over 25 years, with 9 of those years as a department chair. (I was a math professor for 16 years before that.) While I was department chair, we sent more students to work at Microsoft in the 2004-5 academic year than any other college or university in the United States. We also established a graduate certificate program in computer security, which became the largest certificate program at the university. I had major responsibility for working with technical personnel to keep our department's hundreds of computers functional and virus-free, while providing email service to several hundred users. We had to withstand constant hacker attacks and we learned how to reduce the vulnerability of our computer systems.

As a scholar/researcher, I studied complex computer systems and their behavior when attacked or faced with heavy, unexpected loads. I wrote five books on computing, from particular programming languages, to the internal structure of sophisticated operating systems, to the development and efficient creation of highly complex applications. My long-term experience with computers (I had my first computer programming course in 1964) has helped me understand the nature of many of the computer attacks by potential identity thieves and, I hope, be able to explain them and how to defend against them, to a general audience of non-specialists. More than 5,000 people have attended my lectures on identity theft; many others have seen them on closed-circuit television.

I have written more than twenty books, and more than 120 technical articles, most of which are in technical areas.

My interests in data storage and access meshed well with my genealogical interests when I wrote the Genealogy Technology column of the Maryland Genealogical Society Journal for several years. I was the editor or co-editor of that society's journal for many years.