Artificial intelligence is big these days.
It hardly fits into the typical boundaries of other technology upgrades in the digital space—and, it shouldn’t. AI is a general-purpose technology, like steam power, electricity, the internet, and all the other novelties that sparked industrial revolutions and made the world better in certain aspects, worse in others, and undoubtedly different from before.
This forces many of us to think and talk about AI. For better or worse, we find ourselves immersed in an ongoing debate on social media about artificial intelligence, its magical promises, and embarrassing shortcomings. Yet, only a few people are actually in a position to go beyond the “talk” and the more or less grounded opinions about AI, and to know enough about AI to build something useful with it, test it themselves, feel its limitations, and anticipate its real potential. It’s like the world is split into two different groups: those who talk about AI and those who make something useful with it. I wrote this book to empower people to move to the second group.