Catching up with the #1 buzzword: Artificial Intelligence

When I completed my degree in neuroinformatics in 2005, the next career step on the same topic was to go into research or to do a PhD. The areas of machine learning, cognitive science, natural language processing, robotics and all the other parts that make artificial intelligence where academic disciplines that had not hit the broad markets yet. Most companies at that time were still struggling to find out how to use the Internet. Remember, we are talking about web 1.0 with its static web pages, wonderful blinking captions, gif-buttons and online guestbooks. Happy about achieving my master's degree, I did not feel like becoming a scientist or continuing my studies, so (by coincidence) I started doing SAP consultancy. I do not want to say bad things about R/3, but at the time, going from neural nets coding that we did at the University of Edinburgh to ABAP felt like taking a step (or three) backwards in time and technology.