what is the internet, what is ai, and what is for dinner?

 at an "internet is 50" event at the royal society (is 350) yesterday

it was clear that a lot of people want to claim they invented the internet, and they are not wrong, but there are very different viewpoints which correspond to layers, and, as with a lot of archeology, when you dig through the layers of ancient civilisations, you find historical context (as well as entire slices full of carbon indicating rather violent and abrupt end to some).

photonics - 60 years old - clearly was the internet (wasn't at all for 30 years, but who's counting)

radio - 100 years old, and now trending as 6G, despite that most the internet is over WiFi on account of money

ip - whether v4, v5 (st) or v6, this is the echt internet

web (web science etc) - from 92, what a lot of people confuse with the internet despite that zoom and whatsapp aren't web:-)

cloud (compute/data center etc etc) - confusing, since early pictures of the arpanet are clouds, but cloud computing is only about 20 years old. and isn't the internet, despite that some cloud-based services wanna pretend they are.

ai (in search which originally was information retrieval which is machine learning or stats, and the basis of coding/modulation and training signals to optimise for bandwidth and nouse, and also the basis of search. but not the internet either.

This profusion and confusion of layers also happens with AI, thusly:

AI was stats (info theory, maximum likelihood etc etc)

then it was ML (optimisation, training on signal etc)

then it was AI (only because an artificial neural network included the world "neural", despite being as similar to natural neural networks as spiderwebs.