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CHAPTER 8

Raising Them Right: AI and the

Internet of Big Things

Alec Shuldiner
Autodesk, Inc, San Francisco, CA, United States

8.1 INTRODUCTION

Nature displays phantasmagorical complexity in all its parts: it may be
grokked, but it resists analysis. The made world, our intuition tells us, works
differently. While research and experience alike turn up exceptions, deep
down we hold these beliefs to be self-evident: that actors in the marketplace
are rational; that someone, somewhere, knows how a thing works; that there
is a little man behind the curtain, and that we could catch him, if we were
only quick enough.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is employed to boost human mental capacity,
thereby facilitating our understanding of nature, our own society, the global
economy, and like complexities. Yet AI, akin to natural systems in its com-
plexity, its interactivity, and, increasingly, its autonomy, itself likewise resists
analysis. Despite this, we are working hard to realize a vision of the Internet
of Everything that requires us to embed AI in our software, our private and
public operations, and our (smart) things. We may come to understand old
problems better than we have in the past, and we are undoubtedly creating
important new capabilities, but we are working at least as quickly to obscure
the chain of intention in this new world we are building.

8.2 “THINGS ARE ABOUT TO GET WEIRD”

A couple of years ago my employer, the software house Autodesk, began
training IBM’s Watson system to understand and to respond helpfully to
the questions asked by our customers in online forums. The goal was to
eliminate a significant portion of the customer interactions handled by
human employees, and in this Watson has been successful. The path to
get there, though, turned out to be different from the one we usually follow
when creating business capabilities, and much harder to understand both as a

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