Why artificial intelligence is different from previous technology waves

This post originally published on Medium. It is republished here with permission. 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 Analyticsconferences, 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 Automated Insights to become a Ph.D. student at UNC studying artificial intelligence.