Everyday AI use while being developed: a personal, practical talk about moving from fear to fluency, and from spectacle to a tool we share with everyone.
In 1990, at a Gordon Research Conference, a young graduate student presented neural networks to a room of crystallographers and was met with: "That's no big deal. We knew that decades ago." The room went silent, and Sung-Hou Kim stepped in to rescue the moment.
The story is about humility, not nostalgia: expertise can either humiliate the next generation or help them stand back up.
The sentence "We've done this for decades" is not wrong. The problem is what it does socially. It closes the door just when the room needs more people: alternative ideas, creative pressure, skeptical pressure, non-scientific perspectives, and people who ask the naive question that experts no longer ask.
The lesson: AI is most powerful when it helps us cross the lanes we once stayed inside. Sung-Hou's lab worked because it was not one lane — crystallography, biology, chemistry, computation, and people willing to collide ideas.
Berkeley stands as a public-institution ideal: world-class excellence plus a diversity of disciplines and people.