Why Artificial Intelligence is Different from Previous Technology Waves

If you like this article, check out another by Robbie: What Will Stop AI's Momentum? I've been around computing since my older brother got a Commodore 64 for Christmas in 1983. I took my first "business machines" class in high school in 1991, attended my first computer science class in 1994 (learning Pascal), and moved to Silicon Valley in 1997 after Cisco converted my internship into a permanent position. I worked in Cisco's IT department for several years before moving to their engineering group where I designed networking protocols. I went to grad school at MIT in 2004 where I met the founders of several companies in Y Combinator's first couple of batches and worked on Hubspot before it was Hubspot. After writing several books for O'Reilly and attending the first O'Reilly Web 2.0 and MIT Sloan Sports Analytics conferences, I started a "Web 2.0 for Sports" company called StatSheet.com in 2007, which in 2010 pivoted into the first Natural Language Generation (NLG) company called Automated Insights. I recently stepped back at Ai to become a Ph.D. student at UNC studying Artificial Intelligence. All of that to say I've had a bird's eye view to watch the incredible innovation that's occurred over the past 30 years in technology.