Looking for AI use-cases
This image comes from a book by Martin Honeysett called ‘Microphobia’, published in 1982. It’s full of great jokes and I could have used almost any of them, because they’re all making the same point - what are you supposed to do with this thing? I played Saboteur on the ZX Spectrum that my father bought that year, but what else?
A couple of years earlier, Dan Bricklin had found one answer: he saw a professor making a spreadsheet with chalk, on a blackboard, and realised that you could do this in ‘software’. So he made VisiCalc, the first successful computer spreadsheet, and when he showed it to accountants it blew their minds: they could do a week’s work in an afternoon. An Apple II to run VisiCalc cost at least $12,000* adjusted for inflation, but even so, people reached for their cheque-books the moment they saw it: computer spreadsheets changed the world, for accountants.
However, if you had showed VisiCalc to a lawyer or a graphic designer, their response might well have been ‘that’s amazing, and maybe my book-keeper should see this, but I don’t do that’. Lawyers needed a word processor, and graphic designers needed (say) Postscript, Pagemaker and Photoshop, and that took longer.
