In 1979, two M.I.T. computer-science alumni and a Harvard Business School graduate launched a new piece of computer software for the Apple II machine, an early home computer. Called VisiCalc, short for "visible calculator," it was a spreadsheet, with an unassuming interface of monochrome numerals and characters. But it was a dramatic upgrade from the paper-based charts traditionally used to project business revenue or manage a budget. VisiCalc could perform calculations and update figures across columns and rows in real time, based on formulas that the user programmed in. VisiCalc sold more than seven hundred thousand copies in its first six years, and almost single-handedly demonstrated the utility of the Apple II, which retailed for more than a thousand dollars at the time (the equivalent of more than five thousand dollars in 2023).

Visicalc was the first spreadsheet, 20 rows by 5 column (!) by Dan Bricklin with Bob Frankston. The tools that makes the world go around… You have a world before 1978 and a world after 1978. And the world after 1978 has transposed in the spreadsheet programs (now thousands of rows by thousands of columns, and in the cloud!) what they were used to do by hand. Neural networks (the logical and computational engines of AI systems) are not so different from a spreadsheet. In effect, they are spreadsheets!

AI's effect on employment will be similar to the effect of spreadsheets on the finance industry. AI can get a bad rap. The idea that artificial intelligence can automate work naturally raises the question, "Well, what happens to the people who were doing that work?" While that is a valid question, most of this generation of artificial intelligence--the kind I focus on investing in--could actually improve jobs and even can increase employment. Most AI today is mental automation, the speeding up of mundane tasks of thought. Given the fact that most thought work is now done with computers, thought work is more straightforward for computers to automate than physical work.

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. In the past two months, Mayfield Robotics, makers of Kuri the robot, has shut down sales and operations, and Jibo, which has run through more than $70 million of venture funding, announced a significant downsizing of the company. This marks a sad time for the personal/social robot market. There were amazingly talented and passionate people at both of those companies who drove themselves constantly in the pursuit of building awesome products that were well-liked.

Dan Bricklin, of Newton, Mass., inventor of the personal computer spreadsheet, stands with a laptop computer in his Newton home, Wednesday, May 24, 2006 (AP Photo/Steven Senne) When President Carter talked to Americans in July 1979 about their crisis of confidence--"the erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America"--Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston were witnessing the rapidly rising confidence in their electronic spreadsheet, the first killer app for the PC. A little over three years later, Time magazine named the PC "the Machine of the Year," observing that this innovation "happened to pop up when it did, right now, at this point in time, like the politicians call it, because we were getting hungry to be ourselves again." This week's milestones in the history of technology include the birth of VisiCalc, the world's first handheld-sized scientific calculator, and Daguerreotype photography. Software Arts is incorporated by founders Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston for the purpose of developing VisiCalc, the world's first spreadsheet program, which will be published by a separate company, Personal Software Inc. (later named VisiCorp). VisiCalc will come to be widely regarded as the first "killer app" that turned the PC into a serious business tool.

It's Man v. Machine on Jeopardy this week as IBM super-robot Watson takes on former champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. At The Atlantic, we're using Watson as an occasion to think about what smart robots mean for the American worker. This is Part Three of a three-part series on the exciting and sometimes scary capabilities of artificial intelligence. Read Part One --Anything You Can Do, Robots Can Do Better -- and Part Two -- Can a Computer Do a Lawyer's Job? Since the beginnings of the personal computer industry, computer hardware sales have often been driven by a particular software application so compelling that it has motivated customers to purchase the machine required to run it. When the Apple II was introduced in 1977, it was initially a success within a relatively small group of computer hobbyists.

Smack in the center of Palo Alto, Calif., sits a huge warehouse featuring three-story ceilings and at least 15,000 square feet of open space. Standing as it does in the very zip code that gave birth to Google, Facebook, and HP, this building represents some of the most valuable real estate on the planet. Inside, a platoon of workers bend metal and install soundproof glass, readying the structure for its rebirth. If Andy Rubin and his backers have their way, this former apricot canning facility will become ground zero for a massive shift in how society and business understand not just data, computing, and the Internet, but the very workings of the world around us. Back in 2016, we'll tell our kids, we didn't have the actual Internet. Call it the actuated Internet -- a virtuous circle of real world objects, at-scale artificial intelligence, and command and control that animates everything of value in our lives.