While the market is already flooded with books and news articles addressing how artificial intelligence (A.I.) will ruthlessly disrupt and transform numerous industries, this book differentiates itself by placing such technological advancement within a grand, historical framework of how human beings have for millennia strived to decipher how the world actually works and make reliable predictions through various types of data and modeling. In this vein, the recent development of A.I. is but the latest chapter in our never-ending quest to understand, predict, and manage everything that goes around us.
As the author explains, one huge breakthrough comes from a paradigm shift that sees researchers substitute a mechanical worldview in which anything can be boiled down to a handful of complicated mathematical models for a more probabilistic one, i.e. most of what goes on in the world are way too complex to be fully captured in a deterministic way, so a more pragmatic approach is through probability modeling. Coupled with rapidly increasing amounts of data, ever cheaper cloud storage, and significantly faster computing power, the field of A.I. has been experiencing a strong resurgence since late 1990s and there is no signs of slowing down.
The latter part of the book explains how major tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon have built up a nearly insurmountable competitive advantage through the sheer massive volumes of data they have long accumulated and analyzed, which have helped optimized and personalized their products and services.