Comment by OliverJones

It's not just AI. Our trade's history is chockfull of valiant efforts to solve problems that were overrun by the exponential decline of computing costs by the time they really worked properly.

Remember DSEE / ClearCase? They had all sorts of complicated virtual file systems to deliver tagged and branched contents of source code repositories. But drive space expanded with a Moore's-law style curve and now we have "git pull". Far simpler. System administrators don't hate our guts for adopting git.

Remember PHIGS? We needed display lists for graphics engines because host machines were too slow. Silicon Graphics took the other approach, and now we have GL.

Remember terminal concentrators like Digital's LAT? You don't? Good. I wish I didn't. (Handling 9600 baud interrupts was too big a load for a host machine. Really.)

Remember optical typesetting machines? The digital outlines / images for creating nice-looking letters used to be too big and complex to use for creating the images for actual pages. You want to use Univers or Gill Sans to set a document? Fine. Buy a Selectric typeball. Or go pay Linotype or Monotype a bundle for a little optical thingy with images of all the letters on it. Take the lid off your typesetting machine and put that thingy into it. You want to set Japanese? Too bad for you. Apple, Adobe, Chuck Bigelow and Kris Holmes, and Matt Carter, and Donald Knuth, decided to ride the exponential rocket and the rest is history.

The bright side: Margaret Hamilton and her team on the Apollo moonshot project used simple, reliable, radiation-hardened, and redundant computers with bugfree software to get those guys to the moon and back.

Let's be careful: Generals always fight the last war. Before starting new valiant efforts, we should carefully assess whether the appropriate technology for the planned delivery date is JMOS -- Just a Matter of Software. Sometimes it might not be the case. But most often it will be.