The AI Ladder

Chapter 1. What in the AI? How Did We Get Here?

The idea for this book came to us on a crisp fall day as we pondered on lunch in the hustle-and-bustle streets of New York City. Rob pulled up Foursquare to find a good place to eat (a restaurant recommendation validated by thousands of people we don’t know) and we settled on a spot that was a bit of a walk, tucked away on a city block we’d never heard of before. Paul checked the weather forecast (bespoke to about a mile and updated every 15 minutes) to see if we needed jackets, while Rob pulled up the destination using Google Maps in augmented reality mode. As we trekked the city streets, Paul used the Starbucks app to order teas that were piping hot, ready the moment we arrived at the halfway mark. We had devices that monitored our steps and heart rates, and just before we arrived at the restaurant, Rob Shazam’ed a song we heard blasting out of a café that we thought was cool. And just like that, we generated a heck of a lot of decorated data. By decorated, we mean that it’s not just data, it’s contextualized data. It’s data superimposed on a map of Manhattan, data that can be correlated with other data, data that gives a picture of what we were doing, and what other visitors to New York might want to do, are doing, or have done. Where we walked, what we listened to, what we ate and drank—that’s all decorated data, data in context.

Over lunch we reflected on all that data and declared ourselves digital city cartographers, mapping ...