The Early Days of Tech: A World of Wizardry
The dawn of my tech career was during the dot-com boom. Many have noticed the parallels of the current AI boom with the dot-com era. History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes etc.
Take as an example the practice of network engineering. Movies like Hackers, Sneakers, and The Matrix formed a world view where the internet was a wild chaotic frontier and only a chosen few knew the precise incantations to wield its mystic powers. So the consensus view, at least in my neck of the woods, was that network engineers were literally wizards, masters of a dark art. Yes, network engineers. Let me explain.
Imagine this scene- you're a Windows NT tech or Netware admin working in a sprawling data center at the edge of some forest in the PNW. Business is humming, your server room is roaring with white noise. And then bam! the helpdesk phones all start ringing at once, remote offices complain they can’t upload files, lotus notes has frozen everyone’s desktops, the Sun server at HQ is down! Then some elusive, hooded figure arrives. How’d they get here so fast? You just assume they rode in on a Kawasaki Ninja, like Trinity, or perhaps manifested from the fog at the edge of the parking lot.
Server rooms always had a special room within a room, with a locked door, usually no signage, and your keycard for sure didn’t work on it. For the network engineer there are no locked doors. You watch closely as they glide through access points like a Jedi knight would, a slight wave of their keycard and every locked door yields. Rumor is they can even access the CEO’s office. You follow them into the server room, the plan is to pretend to rack servers nearby to get a closer look. The door is wide open! You finally get to peek inside the secret room, and you see it’s full of undecipherable, strange, alien looking machines. The network engineer has a terminal consoled into one of them, some kind of ESOTERIC BLACK BOX with a spaghetti of unusual connectors and wires feeding in and out of it, as if it was the Prime Nexus holding all of reality together. You need to get closer, so you pretend to pull up one of the raised tiles near the door. This is perfect, now you can see the terminal screen! You nearly gasp as you glimpse the terminal and see an endless waterfall of strange code spilling down, line after line, like an actual matrix.
“What on EARTH IS THAT??”
Suddenly you realize you spoke the thought out loud.
Bewildered, confused, and actually kind of scared, you put the tile down and scurry back to your work mates who are watching from the server racks. Their eyes are wide, they can’t wait for your report. Within seconds however, everything is suddenly back up. The network engineer quickly packs up and without a word or even acknowledging anyone, exits the building and is... gone. You don’t know what they did or how they did it, but their god-like abilities to fix catastrophes with a single command was the stuff of legends.
The Irresistible Allure Of The Esoteric
Those were The Network Engineers. Keep in mind I was just a teenager at the time, but this was my actual lived experience. Now the most revered of these internet super-wizards were the so-called CCIEs. They all had a 4 digit number stamped to the end of their name, like some kind of divine suffix. The certification’s difficulty was legendary, simply impossible for mortals, like converting lead into gold, or achieving enlightenment, but for the chosen few it was a ticket to godhood. As anointed wardens and lords of the internet frontier, they were courted like professional athletes by the most powerful organizations on earth.
For a young sci-fi and fantasy enthusiast like myself, the allure of learning a “dark art” like network engineering was irresistible. How could I not dive headfirst into this mysterious world? So, I made a beeline from building PCs and administering NT servers straight into the heart of this esoteric field: packet switching, internet backbones, BGP, firewalls, DECnet, the RFC’s, all of it. I quickly learned that while these skills were challenging, they weren’t insurmountable. Everything was explainable, made by regular people kinda like me.
But I never lost my attraction to the “Infrastructure Esoterica”. Each time I encountered a new black box kind of technology, I'd dive in, demystify it, and discover the same thing: "Oh… its not that weird!” It became a compulsion—to shine a bright light into the darkest parts of the forest, revealing the ordinary behind the extraordinary.
From Dot-com Dark Lords to AI Mystics
The parallels between the dot-com and current AI boom is uncanny. There's the obvious financial parallels, Nvidia’s mooning stock chart mirrors Cisco’s. Deep Learning reseachers are these AI mystics with god-like powers, the chosen few, anointed to lead us to techno-utopia. Like the Cisco engineers of old, they are rare and highly sought after, treated like rock stars and revered as wizards. Its happening all over again, and this time the promise of AI is even greater than the promise of the internet.
It remains to be seen if the technology parallels hold. The techno-esoterica of our 2020’s so far is the transformer. Matmuls in multi-dimensional space with tens of thousands of dimensions represent the new chaotic frontier. These are truly "black boxes," even to their creators. Scale them up, and they work better, but the why and how remain elusive. It’s like we’ve discovered an alien species or can suddenly access a new spatial dimension. Now we might genuinely be dealing with a true dark art! How can I resist the pull of this new sorcery? Will it be like all the times before, where a deep dive reveals that "Oh… it's not that weird”? Or have we finally created a technology that defies explanation?
This Time Is Not Different
Our pattern of deciphering black boxes serves as a prophecy for our future. I’m feeling confident, not full-blown e/acc confident, but it feels like we’ve been here before. I aim to be there when the answers emerge. As a species, we have literally turned lead into gold (with a particle accelerator, but that still counts), and now we've taught sand how to think. In the meantime let's see if we can, at the very least, understand the magic behind the code.