By David Glenn Cox
You can’t go anywhere today without hearing all about AI. It’s going to do everything! It’s going to take over the world! It’s going to be wonderful! Only three people in the whole world will have a job! I ran across something quite by accident which gave me insight and great pause into the nature of AI. It was quite by accident I came across a piece of AI generated information.
I was looking for a date for an event involving the Wright Brothers. When I came across what AI had to expertly say. And it occurred to me almost immediately what we are up against. Children lie, politicians lie but we can normally see through those lies and they die there on the vine. AI however doesn’t know or understand the difference between true knowledge and ordinary hokum. If you ask it a question it only amalgamates the available information and regurgitates it back unable to differentiate the difference.
If it’s on the Internet that the moon is made of green cheese or Space aliens helped to build the pyramids in Egypt, guess what? If a famous mathematician publishes a new theory that 6+6 = 17 AI will say 6+6 = 12 by there are some who say 17.
AI told me Professor Samuel Langley was an important influence on the Wright Brothers. It made my blood boil instantly. Absolutely no truth to that whatsoever. At the dawn of the 20th century, nuts, cranks and hopeless farm boys all over the world were experimenting with powered flight. Orville and Wilbur had been intrigued by flight since their father had given them a spinning helicopter toy as children.
Orville Wright was a mechanical genius who designed and built his own printing press before leaving high school. Early in their aeronautical adventures the brothers had obtained lift coefficients from Octave Chanute who was considered a respected expert in the field. The brothers built a glider using Chanute’s numbers, quickly discovering Chanute had apparently pulled those numbers from out of his butt. The brothers decided right there and then. Never to use anyone’s numbers or estimates or ideas, except their own. And only to use principles that they had proven to be correct.
This set the brothers apart. We’ve all seen the videos of the early aviator’s machines. With crazy bouncing, jumping flailing, flapping and falling apart in minutes machines. The Wright Brothers made over 2,000 glider flights. They learned to fly before attempting to build an airplane. They weren’t geniuses like Tesla or Edison. They didn’t have revelations in their sleep and woke up shouting Eureka! The Wright Brothers changed the way inventing was done. They invented the modern research and development project.
The Wrights broke the flying problem down to its component parts. Lift, Control and Power. They developed the wind tunnel to study lift and used 200 different wing designs before choosing one. Then developed wing warping as a means of control. As there were no suitable gasoline engines available for their purpose, the brothers built their own. They hauled their gliders from Dayton, Ohio to the far reaches of North Carolina beaches. Living in a shack being gnawed on relentlessly by hungry mosquitoes. After three years of work, they had developed a machine and installed an engine.
Professor Langley was the head of the Smithsonian Institution. He was considered the government’s top expert on science. He was a bureaucrat with a good government job and the president’s ear. Langley had built a steam powered half scale machine that had flown some great distance unmanned. Clearly steam powered aircraft were the future! Langley was the expert, and the Wright Brothers were just nobodies. When Langley built a full-sized model and attempted to launch it from on top of a house boat it crashed immediately into the Potomac. The Wright Brothers 2,000 glider flights and Samuel Langley one unsuccessful flight.
The Wrights were very quiet about their work while Langley was public. He was the big shot government expert sitting on a high perch. When the Wright’s had developed their aircraft to a functioning machine and tried to sell it to the Army. It was Langley who said it was nothing but a novelty and not to bother with it. It was only after the Wrights made headlines in Europe and started selling machines abroad that the president read about it in the newspaper!
There were lots of people claiming to have flying machines. Santos-Dumont had a working flying machine but turning it was a dangerous activity. When the Wrights arrived in Europe they were treated with a great deal of skepticism. But when Wilbur took off and began doing figure eights over the field Europe was stunned. Nobody but nobody had a flying machine that could do that. The Wright Brothers were hailed in Europe as the Kings of the air! Langley had developed a PR machine. Just wait, any day now Professor Langley will show us all how it’s done!
The Wright Brothers didn’t just invent the airplane. They also invented the airplane propeller. They noted the propeller was just a spinning wing. (helicopter toy) We measure the force of a jet or rocket engine today in pounds of thrust. Because the Wright Brothers had borrowed their sister’s kitchen scale to determine their aircrafts thrust. Tying one end of the scale to a post and the other end to their machine and then measuring how many “pounds” of pull it had.
As small piece of fabric from the first Wright flyer was installed on an autonomous helicopter on the Ingenuity rover on Mars. Making the Wright Brothers the first to fly on two planets.
So, to say Professor Langley influenced the Wright Brothers is to say Stephen Hawking Physics theories were greatly influenced by Pee Wee Herman. Professor Langley was so influential to the Wright Brothers. When the time came to donate the first Wright flyer to a museum. They donated it to the British Museum. That is what the Wright’s thought about Professor Langley and the Smithsonian!
But AI doesn’t know anything; it simply gleans all the available information correct or otherwise and regurgitates it. John Wayne defended the Alamo! Maybe Neil Armstrong went to the moon and then again maybe he didn’t! Donald Trump was a great intellectual from the early 21st Century!
“Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.” ― Leonardo da Vinci.
But once you have tasted the airport, you will forever wish you had taken the bus or walked the Earth. For there you have been, and there you will always long never to return.
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