Hal, Ex-Machina, the Terminator and Matrix movies, and I, Robot all trade on the beloved sci-fi meme of robotized AI and the public's collective psyche when it all goes wrong: fascination and fear. After all, if machines become faster, stronger, and brighter than humanity, why wouldn't they turn on their soft, meaty, and dim creators for either enslavement or a full-on purge?

Information overload is a fact of modern life, creating a tyranny of choice often resulting in analysis paralysis. Too many options makes it difficult to understand any one option deeply enough to make an informed decision. That's a problem, because the whole point of Ubiquitous Computing – a term coined by Xerox PARC in the 80s to represent a dream of the time – was to make our lives and businesses better and more efficient. Thankfully, amid the enormity of data lies the means to manage it. Our computing infrastructure has now reached a level of data and connectivity where it's possible for computers to recognize patterns and prioritize options, so it's easier for humans to make informed decisions.

Games are uniquely human, or so we thought – Chess, Jeopardy, and now Go. Will robots take our jobs? Has web search made us dumb? We heard most of these same fears back in the 1990's, when IBM's Deep Blue defeated Grandmaster Garry Kasparov at the chessboard. But defeat is a better teacher than victory and this was certainly the case for Kasparov who has now developed a system called Centaur Chess where a human and computer play as a team with the human choosing from moves suggested by the computer.