Chapter 4: Bus Stop

Here we are, on the precipice of what some are insinuating is the singularity, the point at which technology exceeds the boundaries set forth by those that created it. I’m surely butchering the original classical definition, but to me, that’s what this moment is. A moment in time which, for better or worse, will be irreversible. Do we embrace hubris and ignore Icarus as we hurtle closer and closer to the limits imposed by Moore’s law? Or will all this fear mongering be for nothing when quantum computing becomes a reality and we evolve as a species to embrace computing at a level we can’t even fully fathom yet?

I’m too young to be tinkering with anything electrical. My family bought me a Power Wheels Bigfoot and man did I love that thing. My uncle would take me on weekends to Margo Elementary in Weslaco to ride around the field and little bridges in the recess area. At some point my Bigfoot stopped working, so I got a couple tools from my dad and took the thing apart to try and fix it. No dice, and my Bigfoot lay dormant for years until I’m sure my parents sold it or gave it away. I always think back to that day and wonder if that’s the first time I had the spark to understand how something was engineered. It was a simple electrical motor powered by a 12V battery, but didn’t know that at the time. What I did know was how to use tools to accomplish a task. As I grew up, I’d spend days with my grandfather on home construction sites as he framed up walls and sheathed roofs. He taught me how to work with my hands, using hammers, chalk lines, and various other tools around the job site. My mother was always far more analytically inclined. The virtues and ethos instilled into me from my father I’ll save for another post, but these three individuals genetically and tacitly helped create the professional I am today.

It’s junior high and there’s no better way to pass the time at lunch than lining up and waiting your turn to play four square. Joey Vasquez is in line in front of me, and being the nerdy not yet teens that we are, we’re discussing what we want to do with our lives. If I can recall, I’m sure I told him I wanted to work fixing computers. At this point I had experience taking apart and upgrading our Compaq desktop PC we bought at the RadioShack in Mercedes. Joey tells me he wants to learn C++ because that’s what Windows is written in. This resonated with me, because up to that moment, I hadn’t considered moving into software. The next year I took a course in web development, and though it was fairly rudimentary, it laid the true foundations for what was to come. In high school, I took my first computer science course where C++ was the main language to learn. Fast forward several years later and I’m learning about large language models, nondeterministic polynomial time, and advancements that we’re only now seeing fully actualized.

C# quickly supplanted C++ for all intents and purposes. Almost all the development I’ve done in the past decade has been in that language, though it was derived from the aforementioned which itself was built upon C. I would be lying if I didn’t say artificial intelligence has been crucial in rapidly understanding a new language. What used to take months can now be ascertained in hours. I’m at a juxtaposition because I too see the impending doom AI presents, but yet I take advantage of it as a research tool in the same way that developers did when Google first made indexed searching so convenient. The CEOs of most of the major AI companies in the United States have called for guardrails, but we have a commander in chief whose intelligence is truly unmatched. The moment he heard “regulation” and “AI” in the same sentence, he knew to eschew it in favor of winning the race with China, whatever that looks like. As I type these words, just know that they are my own, influenced only by my life experiences and augmented only when necessary to correct any typographical or grammatical errors I might make.