What a 14-Year-Old Got Right About AI in 1984
IDC ·
The questions I asked about AI at 14 still hold up today: can a machine ask “Why? and How?”, and does it benefit society? Forty-two years ago, I wrote about AI in the non-fiction, math models section for Quest magazine, a high school literary compilation that tapped into creative talent from students at a Colorado […] The post What a 14-Year-Old Got Right About AI in 1984 appeared first on IDC .
The questions I asked about AI at 14 still hold up today: can a machine ask “Why? and How?”, and does it benefit society? Forty-two years ago, I wrote about AI in the non-fiction, math models section for Quest magazine, a high school literary compilation that tapped into creative talent from students at a Colorado high school. I was a bit of a nerd at the time, in 9 th grade, a sysop of a BBS, running my Apple //e overnight to keep my board up and running. I finally upgraded the slow 1200 baud modem, which trickled text across the screen line by line, to 9600 baud the following year, but it still beeped horrendously when people called into my dad’s landline to connect (this was before mobile was a thing). AI was continuously hitting a wall at the time. Bayesian logic was primitive and computers weren’t as powerful as they are today. I had a part-time job as a teaching assistant at a local community college and helped the students (and professor) understand Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC), something I was well versed in, given my 3 to 5 hours per day on the machine. I was a fanatic with 6502 assembler, and later moved up to 8086 machine language. To be clear, machine language in those days had a different meaning from today’s ML. It was based on hexadecimal code using memory locations and stacks to transfer data from point to point in a large memory packet (large being 64 kilobytes).
My AI essay was prescient and outlined some of the fundamental aspects of AI at the time. Below are some excerpts from the essay and how a nerdy 14-year-old thought about AI in 1984. Word processors in those days weren’t usually on computers; they were electric typewriters with memory, so the essay was typed up in standard Courier font, which I try to replicate below. I’ve left out some parts of the text, and my grammar and writing capability were limited at best, as I was more of a math geek.
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Intelligence is a broad and diverse subject. Mankind has been trying to simulate this for many decades. The study of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being conducted at some of the best universities and schools in the world. Artificial Intelligence must first be defined before someone may actual go ahead and start trying to create it via computer, analog devices, chemically, or any other means. AI can be define as “fake knowledge”, yet that has already been created through computers which can perform functions such as compute the probable outcome of a baseball game or can predict the weather fairly accurately. AI can also be defined as deductive reasoning, which is the ability to make a reasonable decision out of a set number of variables. Computers have been able to simulate this and actually perform this as well, so this is not what researchers are looking for. A good definition for AI is the ability to think and to specifically ask the questions “Why? or How?”. This form of AI has been the main concern of modern researchers…
…The main type of AI research are ones using computers and digital electronics. Computers use switches to perform their functions. The computers simply check if a certain circuit has power or not. Doing this they can be programmed to [do] almost anything. A limitation includes that of not being able to do something without command of an user. This is the actual goal AI researchers are trying to accomplish. Once this goal is achieved, a computer’s power will be limitless. One thing scientists have tried to do is to create a program which can create other programs, as if it was learning as it was growing from child to man. It could develop itself slowly by mimicking human behavior as small children do, and by getting information from its environment…Computers are able to comprehend spoken language and to recognize photographic patterns…With guidance however, it is likely that computers will eventually be able to ask the questions “Why? and How?”. Digital electronic switches have been used extensively for attempting to get results of predictions…
AI has been worked on extensively. It is steadily progressing, although a little slowly. It will not be finished in our lifetime, but in the future it may be accomplished…Intelligence is much more than simple knowledge. It is memory, intuition, consciousness, and many other unexplainable factors combined. AI needs some thought on why we humans do need it. A few such reasons are: teaching ability, quicker thinking and research (to help answer questions unknown to us) and most importantly to decrease the strain of unnecessary mental tasks so that humans can challenge greater conquests without wasting time. AI research will prove to be a challenging subject for humans in the future. AI still needs much work, not only in digital electronics, but also in psychology, cephalogy, and other medical professions before the ultimate goal, a complete understanding of AI, can be accomplished.
So this brings us to two questions: “So what does this history lesson matter today?” and “Can you glaze your childhood anymore?” AI has expanded well beyond the traditional capabilities the essay touched on, which included non-digital AI, ‘fake knowledge’, predictive algorithms, deductive reasoning and simulation. The essay opens with thinking and the ability to ask “Why? and How?” Its next section covers autonomous action, a computer performing actions without a user, and suggests this will be an AI superpower, in line with agentic AI today. Then comes the ability for AI to create other programs, the basic capability of recursive self-improvement, followed by mimicry, the way a child learns, which is what all AI tools do today in training (reinforcement learning). That section also notes what computers could already do in the 80s: basic NLP, pattern recognition and predictions. The last section turns to why AI matters and what it means for society. Its main reason is freeing humans to achieve greater conquests. The essay also expects the work to take a long time and defines intelligence as memory, intuition, consciousness and “many other unexplainable factors” combined.
In the 80s, the concepts for AI were straightforward: help improve society. Today a new culture has arrived, with its own jargon and ways of thinking, and much of the discussion turns on regulation, guardrails, execution checks and ethical boundaries, little of which the essay covered.
AI capabilities keep growing. Stanford University’s AI Index, as covered in IEEE Spectrum, outlines how quickly AI has matched or exceeded human performance on a growing number of benchmarks (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Select AI Index technical performance benchmarks compared to human performance, 2012 to 2025. Source: Stanford University AI Index, 2026, as covered in IEEE Spectrum.
Today’s AI tools can read, understand visual diagrams, compete mathematically, offer logical reasoning, classify images, multitask, autonomously execute complex tasks and understand scientific principles, and on a number of benchmarks they match or exceed humans at comprehending writing. AI has moved faster than the essay anticipated, and the pace has caused confusion about what it means for society. Parts of the debate now turn to security, warfighting, hacking and theories of human extinction. Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov would find the concerns familiar. The fundamental questions have not changed, and even a 14-year-old would ask them. Should AI aim to benefit society rather than generate profit at scale for individual companies and organizations? That question sits at the center of today’s competitive AI race. Across 42 years, the constants have been the ethical and societal impacts of AI. The essay’s goal also still holds: an autonomous AI that asks “Why? and How?”, and humans free to “challenge greater conquests without wasting time.”
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