Their book has two goals. First, to document the reach of AI in everyday life: It’s now used to predict corn yields, track gender bias in films, map disease outbreaks and sort vegetables, among hundreds of other applications. But “AIQ” also aims to demystify AI. Each chapter focuses on an algorithm in a different industry, tracing the roots of each back to an innovator from before the computer era. One chapter goes back to Isaac Newton’s stint at the Royal Mint, another to Florence Nightingale’s medical reforms in Crimea, and so on. Each historical figure had a problem to solve and developed a novel solution. And luckily for later generations, the solution proved useful in fields far beyond the original.
