1. Strong AI is the paradigm of trying to model and build human intelligence in a machine. Specific or applied AI, on the other hand, tries to build a method for getting really good at solving a more narrow set of problems.
2. Theranos was a health technology company that promised a new way to collect and test blood samples. After a series of investigations exposed its technology as fraudulent, the company imploded.
3. Cloudera is an enterprise big data company that supports and sells a platform for using Apache Hadoop, an open-source framework for distributed data storage and processing.
4. Spark is a distributed platform for data applications whose main benefit is the ability to process data in memory, which is much faster than applications that must more frequently read data from disk.
5. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, “The Future of Employment” (September 17, 2013), https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/future-of-employment.pdf. Frey and Osborne estimate that 47 percent of total U.S. employment is at risk of computerization. Their claims are controversial, however, and have been challenged from a number of directions.
6. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the advanced R&D wing of the Department of Defense. Over the decades, the agency has funded the development of many breakthrough technologies, including the internet.
7. The Limits to Growth is a 1972 report commissioned by the Club of Rome, a European NGO, that predicted rapid declines in global population and industrial capacity beginning in the early twenty-first century.
8. Robo-advisers are systems that provide automated portfolio management advice.
9. Artificial neural networks are the technology that forms the basis of the recent AI boom.
10. SoFi and Earnest are online lenders that offer personal loans, student loan refinancing, and other services.
11. A protected class is defined by U.S. federal antidiscrimination law as a group of people with a common characteristic who are legally protected from discrimination on the basis of that characteristic. The characteristics include race, religion, and gender.
12. A service of Quicken Loans that offers an online mortgage service.
13. Fintech is short for “financial technology,” and it refers to a group of companies that are trying to use technology to transform financial services.
14. LendingClub is a peer-to-peer lending company. In 2014, it went public in the year’s largest U.S. tech company IPO; in 2016, a series of scandals drove its share price down nearly 85 percent, where it has more or less remained.
15. On December 2, 2015, two attackers killed fourteen people and injured twenty-two others in a mass shooting at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California.
16. Y Combinator is an early-stage startup investor and accelerator.
17. The Homestead steel strike was an 1892 labor dispute at Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead steel mill, in Pennsylvania, involving violent clashes between union members and private security forces.