Designing Autonomous AI

Foreword

It gives me great pleasure to enthusiastically recommend Designing Autonomous AI, written by a leading real-world practitioner in emergent autonomous AI: Kence Anderson.

As the Corporate Vice President currently responsible for new product incubations at Microsoft, and as someone who has been closely involved with creation of new product categories like VPNs, real-time communications and now autonomous systems at Microsoft, I have learned that creating new categories is not a straightforward path.

Established product categories and their underlying technologies and business models are well honed for the real world with well understood problems and solutions. These are things we use in our daily lives.

Fundamental research is important to new category creation but lives in the ether of science, generally abstracted from real world considerations. Researchers create novel methods and demonstrate their promise through results in carefully crafted experiments—the amazing state of the art in AI is a recent example of this.

Importantly, not every method created by researchers is sufficient or workable in the real world. New categories can be created when one or more of these new methods are developed further, grounded in and applied to the real-world environment.

New category creation is a chaotic, primordial process entailing a loop of exploration, learning, and adaptation. This process is very high dimensional and domain dependent; there is no single formula here. However, ...