Is Artificial Intelligence (Finally) the Technology We Need to Save the World?

I've worked in the technology industry now for almost half my life. Frequently, I get asked why I chose to pursue a career in this space (especially when there were so few women doing so when I first jumped on board the high-tech train during the dot-com boom in San Francisco in the late 1990s). Often, I answer this question with a lovely story about attending a two-room schoolhouse in remote Prince Edward Island, the "birthplace" of Anne of Green Gables. I wax poetic about my idyllic childhood and share the eye-opening moment when I fell in love with my first gadget, a hefty portable cellular phone that my dad owned in the 1980s, the spitting image of the device Gordon Gekko flaunted in the 1987 hit flick Wall Street. However, the real answer to this question about why I chose to report on the future is far more complex than a shiny Motorola DynaTAC 8000X.