Back in the 1980s, laziness got me interested in Artificial Intelligence. The idea of getting all the credit, while a machine did all the work, sounded like my kind of gig. At the time, no-one seemed to worry that the early neural networks we worked on would develop consciousness or take over the world, wiping out humanity in the process. Instead, we used new “backpropagation” algorithms to predict quite successfully when the recession going on at the time would end. (Yes, sadly we had recessions back then too).
We forecasted the result of the surprising John Major General Election win in 1992, helped Prêt à Manger calculate how many of each sandwich to make depending on the weather, and suggested the best prices for luxury goods. It seemed, at least to me and my colleagues, that AI was going to have a massive impact on the world, although none of us knew what this would be like or how long it would take.
