Signals

There are 6 ingredients in the formation of this memory: the movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a Speak & Spell, a crystal radio kit, an aluminum saucer, lots of 22 gauge wire, and a tall tree. If you’ve seen ET it’s not hard to figure out where my imagination immediately went with this set of inputs. But that’s not the memory, instead it’s what came after my ignorance left me with a disassembled Speak and Spell and no new alien friends.

After my failed experiment I remember my dad drawing out sets of waves on paper. Some with varying heights and others with varying spacing. I remember him explaining that amplitude and frequency modulation were different methods to encode and transmit information from one point to another. He explained that my crystal radio used its coil to select a frequency and the crystal + earpiece to "convert" the amplitude into sound.

The memory however comes decades later. I’m driving south from Oregon into Northern California, crossing the Siskiyou Summit just past Ashland. I lose the FM radio station I’d been listening to, so I start scanning the FM range. Nothing comes up. I switch to AM and start scanning. At 680 kHz I hear something fuzz in. Someone is reading the call letters KNBR. I know it’s coming from San Francisco. It’s ~300 miles away. It was dusk. I was getting some bounce from the ionosphere but it was just a bit mystical hearing that voice crackle.

I’m not an RF Engineer, nor an Electrical Engineer. I’m not a scientist. I don’t have an exceptionally deep technical background. What I am lucky enough to have is the combustible combination of ignorance and the willingness to experiment. Sometimes asking what others might call stupid questions; testing those ideas and most importantly admitting that I was wrong gives me the keys to unlock a much deeper world.

If I have one intellectual fear about the propagation of intelligence tools, it’s that we’ll lose the magic of ignorance and humility. For me at least, the most impactful lessons have come from slow meandering mistakes where I’ve backed myself into a corner and had to educate my way out. I don’t know that there’s space left for that kind of intentional waste when the goal is to automate everything all at once. The memory - not knowing something isn’t a weakness, it’s the beginning of your next great adventure - is something I’m not yet ready to let go. For now I think my answer to this quandary is to keep AI in the known zone and let my ignorance guide my own discoveries.