Artificial intelligence is great at predicting the size of hurricanes, but humans still need to figure out their impact

One of the modern computer's first killer apps was predicting the weather. John von Neumann, who built the initial ENIAC computer, became fascinated with predicting weather in the 1930s. He called it "the most complex, interactive, and highly nonlinear problem that had ever been conceived of." In 1948, he assembled a team of meteorologists to create a mathematical model that would describe what weather would occur based on conditions in the atmosphere. These first weather predictions took more than 24 hours to compute, but proved the idea was possible--and that we needed faster computers.