Clippy Didn't Just Annoy You -- He Changed the World

There are few things hotter in tech right now than artificial intelligence. You'll hear people with titles like "chief experience officer" and "thinkfluence concierge" talk about "neural networks" and "machine learning" and "natural language processing." The idea is, you can talk to your computer as if it were a person. Eventually, the idea goes, you can hold full conversations with an AI chat bot, asking it to answer complex questions and undertake complicated tasks. But nearly two decades ago, our current era of AI overload started with two simple sentences.