My adolescent interest in #AI was mostly informed by popular fiction, as you might imagine, especially once I got to mid...

My adolescent interest in #AI was mostly informed by popular fiction, as you might imagine, especially once I got to middle school (or "junior high") and found that the place I attended, Muirlands (in the tony La Jolla neighborhood which also holds the associated La Jolla High School just a few blocks away) had a good school library with lots of good (and bad) reading material. I started reading #sciencefiction in earnest about this time, and for a while the cultural assumptions of "Western" sci-fi shaped my thoughts and hopes for the future.By 2001 or 2002 at latest, I'd ceased reading sci-fi and indeed almost ceased reading any fiction, but that's another story.Anyway I can recall my high-school optimism, which was stoked by the premiere of Star Trek: The Next Generation, whose first few seasons roughly coincide with my high-school years. Surely we'd all be living in space soon, or at least privy to the start of massive space constructions—orbiting colonies a la Gundam, perhaps (thou...