With the advent of new technologies, experts now say the definition of intelligence is changing. Smart people are not just individuals capable of solving complicated problems on their own, but also those who understand the way artificial intelligence, or AI, can best serve them. Simply put, understanding technology is essential. Yet technology and artificial intelligence often scare people who get tangled in complicated explanations of what AI is and how it works. Two professors, Nick Polson from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and James Scott from the University of Texas at Austin, tried to put a face on the technology by writing a book that illustrates the beginning of AI through several examples of historical figures and other individuals who developed algorithms for humanity's different problems.

Machines are already better than humans at a number of things, such as playing chess. There's no way a human could beat a machine at that type of thing. And even at things such as image recognition – trying to figure out whether there's a cat or a dog in a photo – the machines have gotten incredibly good at doing that, too. On the other side, there's a lot of things that humans still do better than machines. For example, just picking up a cup and drinking from it is something that humans can do very efficiently (while) a machine faces way more difficulty.