“intertwingularity”: Theodor H. Nelson, Computer Lib: You Can and Must Understand Computers Now (South Bend, IN: Nelson, 1974).
total number of web pages: “How Search Works,” Inside Search, Google, 2013, accessed April 26, 2015.
90 billion searches a month: Steven Levy, “How Google Search Dealt with Mobile,” Medium, Backchannel, January 15, 2015.
50 million blogs in the early 2000s: David Sifry, “State of the Blogosphere, August 2006,” Sifry’s Alerts, August 7, 2006.
65,000 per day are posted: “YouTube Serves Up 100 Million Videos a Day Online,” Reuters, July 16, 2006.
300 video hours every minute, in 2015: “Statistics,” YouTube, April 2015, https://goo.gl/RVb7oz.
women online first outnumbered men: Deborah Fallows, “How Women and Men Use the Internet: Part 2—Demographics,” Pew Research Center, December 28, 2005.
51 percent of netizens are female: Calculation based on “Internet User Demographics: Internet Users in 2014,” Pew Research Center, 2014; and “2013 Population Estimates,” U.S. Census Bureau, 2015.
bone-creaking 44 years old: Weighted average of internet users in 2014 based on “Internet User Demographics,” Pew Research Center, 2014; and “2014 Population Estimates,” U.S. Census Bureau, 2014.
mcdonalds.com was still unclaimed: Joshua Quittner, “Billions Registered,” Wired 2(10), October 1994.
2: COGNIFYING
several hundred “instances” of the AI: Personal visit to IBM Research, June 2014.
“world’s best diagnostician”: Personal correspondence with Alan Greene.
$18 billion in investments since 2009: Private analysis by Quid, Inc., 2014.
in-house AI research teams: Reed Albergotti, “Zuckerberg, Musk Invest in Artificial-Intelligence Company,” Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2014.
purchased AI companies since 2014: Derrick Harris, “Pinterest, Yahoo, Dropbox and the (Kind of) Quiet Content-as-Data Revolution,” Gigaom, January 6, 2014; Derrick Harris “Twitter Acquires Deep Learning Startup Madbits,” Gigaom, July 29, 2014; Ingrid Lunden, “Intel Has Acquired Natural Language Processing Startup Indisys, Price ‘North’ of $26M, to Build Its AI Muscle,” TechCrunch, September 13, 2013; and Cooper Smith, “Social Networks Are Investing Big in Artificial Intelligence,” Business Insider, March 17, 2014.
expanding 70 percent a year: Private analysis by Quid, Inc., 2014.
taught an AI to learn to play: Volodymyr Mnih, Koray Kavukcuoglu, David Silver, et al., “Human-Level Control Through Deep Reinforcement Learning,” Nature 518, no. 7540 (2015): 529–33.
Betterment or Wealthfront: Rob Berger, “7 Robo Advisors That Make Investing Effortless,” Forbes, February 5, 2015.
80 percent of its revenue: Rick Summer, “By Providing Products That Consumers Use Across the Internet, Google Can Dominate the Ad Market,” Morningstar, July 17, 2015.
3 billion queries that Google conducts: Danny Sullivan, “Google Still Doing at Least 1 Trillion Searches Per Year,” Search Engine Land, January 16, 2015.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated: James Niccolai, “Google Reports Strong Profit, Says It’s ‘Rethinking Everything’ Around Machine Learning,” ITworld, October 22, 2015.
the AI winter: “AI Winter,” Wikipedia, accessed July 24, 2015.
Billions of neurons in our brain: Frederico A. C. Azevedo, Ludmila R. B. Carvalho, Lea T. Grinberg, et al., “Equal Numbers of Neuronal and Non-Neuronal Cells Make the Human Brain an Isometrically Scaled-up Primate Brain,” Journal of Comparative Neurology 513, no. 5 (2009): 532–41.
run neural networks in parallel: Rajat Raina, Anand Madhavan, and Andrew Y. Ng, “Large-Scale Deep Unsupervised Learning Using Graphics Processors,” Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML ’09 (New York: ACM, 2009), 873–80.
neural nets running on GPUs: Klint Finley, “Netflix Is Building an Artificial Brain Using Amazon’s Cloud,” Wired, February 13, 2014.
dozen examples as a child before it can distinguish: Personal correspondence with Paul Quinn, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Delaware, August 6, 2014.
thousand games of chess: Personal correspondence with Daylen Yang (author of the Stockfish chess app), Stefan Meyer-Kahlen (developed the multiple award-winning computer chess program Shredder), and Danny Kopec (American chess International Master and cocreator of one of the standard computer chess testing systems), September 2014.
“akin to building a rocket ship”: Caleb Garling, “Andrew Ng: Why ‘Deep Learning’ Is a Mandate for Humans, Not Just Machines,” Wired, May 5, 2015.
In 2006, Geoff Hinton: Kate Allen, “How a Toronto Professor’s Research Revolutionized Artificial Intelligence,” Toronto Star, April 17, 2015.
he dubbed “deep learning”: Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton, “Deep Learning,” Nature 521, no. 7553 (2015): 436–44.
the network effect: Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 1998).
famous man-versus-machine match: “Deep Blue,” IBM 100: Icons of Progress, March 7, 2012.
rather than competes against them: Owen Williams, “Garry Kasparov—Biography,” KasparovAgent.com, 2010.
freestyle chess matches: Arno Nickel, Freestyle Chess, 2010.
centaurs won 53 games: Arno Nickel, “The Freestyle Battle 2014,” Infinity Chess, 2015.
several different chess programs: Arno Nickel, “‘Intagrand’ Wins the Freestyle Battle 2014,” Infinity Chess, 2015.
grand master rating of all time: “FIDE Chess Profile (Carlsen, Magnus),” World Chess Federation, 2015.
AI that can view a photo portrait of any person: Personal interview at Facebook, September 2014.
70 percent of American workers: U.S. Census Bureau, “Current Population Reports: Farm Population,” Persons in Farm Occupations: 1820 to 1987 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988), 4.
all but 1 percent of their jobs: “Employed Persons by Occupation, Sex, and Age,” Employment & Earnings Online, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015.
this is a big deal: Scott Santens, “Self-Driving Trucks Are Going to Hit Us Like a Human-Driven Truck,” Huffington Post, May 18, 2015.