The prologue of The Atomic Human opens at a precise moment: December 8th, 2013, in a penthouse suite at Harrah’s Casino in Nevada. This setting serves as the stage for a pivotal shift in the field of machine learning, when the discipline began rebranding itself as “artificial intelligence.” The author, attending the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, witnesses Facebook’s strategic move into AI research, marked by the recruitment of Yann LeCun to lead their new AI lab.
The text contrasts the author’s academic perspective with the corporate ambitions represented by Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. Where traditional machine learning researchers had previously distanced themselves from the term “AI” due to its association with overpromised and underdelivered classical approaches, industry was now embracing it. The author notes his discomfort with this shift, preferring the term “machine intelligence” to avoid cultural baggage.
The prologue tracks the rapid transformation of the field, illustrated by the conference’s growth from 2,000 delegates in 2013 to 13,000 by 2019. It also traces the career trajectories of key academics, including Zoubin Ghahramani (who became Google’s VP for AI chief), Max Welling (who moved to Qualcomm), and the author himself (who led an Amazon division). Using Henry Ford’s famous anecdote about customers wanting “a faster horse,” the author questions whether today’s AI customers are similarly asking for “a smarter human” rather than understanding the true nature of machine intelligence.
The prologue concludes by positioning these changes as the beginning of a broader transformation that extends beyond tech industries into the wider world. The author suggests we are still in the early stages of this transformation, setting up the book’s exploration of what these changes mean for society and our understanding of intelligence itself.
Summary
The prologue of The Atomic Human opens at a precise moment: December 8th, 2013, in a penthouse suite at Harrah’s Casino in Nevada. This setting serves as the stage for a pivotal shift in the field of machine learning, when the discipline began rebranding itself as “artificial intelligence.” The author, attending the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, witnesses Facebook’s strategic move into AI research, marked by the recruitment of Yann LeCun to lead their new AI lab.
The text contrasts the author’s academic perspective with the corporate ambitions represented by Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. Where traditional machine learning researchers had previously distanced themselves from the term “AI” due to its association with overpromised and underdelivered classical approaches, industry was now embracing it. The author notes his discomfort with this shift, preferring the term “machine intelligence” to avoid cultural baggage.
The prologue tracks the rapid transformation of the field, illustrated by the conference’s growth from 2,000 delegates in 2013 to 13,000 by 2019. It also traces the career trajectories of key academics, including Zoubin Ghahramani (who became Google’s VP for AI chief), Max Welling (who moved to Qualcomm), and the author himself (who led an Amazon division). Using Henry Ford’s famous anecdote about customers wanting “a faster horse,” the author questions whether today’s AI customers are similarly asking for “a smarter human” rather than understanding the true nature of machine intelligence.
The prologue concludes by positioning these changes as the beginning of a broader transformation that extends beyond tech industries into the wider world. The author suggests we are still in the early stages of this transformation, setting up the book’s exploration of what these changes mean for society and our understanding of intelligence itself.