How Far Can Technology Take Us?

Cyberpunk genre has been fascinating to me even as a child. I remember watching Blade Runner and Akira in my earlier days thinking "Wow, this technology looks so cool." As I grew older, I understood that the cyberpunk genre was more dystopian than a technological utopia. Nevertheless, this fascination I had with technology from pop-culture is where the bread crumbs started to fall...

Italy 2018

After I graduated with my Associate's, I treated myself to a trip to Italy with some family. On the trip, I got to reconnect with my distant cousins and met their spouses for the first time. One morning, I woke up early to walk the neighborhood and take in the scenery. I noticed my cousin's husband was up early as well, sitting at the dining table working on his computer. I glanced at his screen and it was bright blue, no software interfaces, just words and numbers on a lot of lines. It looked like something I've seen in an espionage movie. (Looking back, it was just the terminal hahaha) So I asked, "Hey, why does your screen look like that?". He responds, "Oh, I'm just working on this video game my company is getting ready to launch". Interesting... another bread crumb.

Growing up in the inner city of Detroit, I attended underfunded schools with limited resources. I never got exposed to the real workings behind technology or what made technology technology. I've only ever been a consumer. That interaction I had with my cousin's husband showed me what it looked like to be a developer. So, like any curious person I started to look into the field.

Artificial intelligence

I think the concept of AI is pretty interesting. Lately, it's everywhere in the news and has become pretty normalized. However, before the media rave, it was an idea of fiction to have a construct think critically about ideas or information that wasn't physically in front of you. When OpenAI released the first version of ChatGPT I was taken aback at what it could accomplish. I started my journey into the realm of computers about a year prior. At that time I knew computers operated in binary, 1's and 0's... so how could some model do such complex work with that as the basis? I had to make sense of it.

So what career path could teach me about technology in its entirety? I like AI but I like cybersecurity as well, and what about those apps on my phone? Too many interests... but I wanted to understand it all. Interestingly enough, these all fall under one umbrella.

Computer Science