A month later, I arrived at IDR’s office on Long Island; apart from the brief burst of Fawlty Towers, I had yet to see the CMD in action. As David Russell watched the video streaming into the window, he saw oil rigs blazing, riots in the streets and anything else that might prompt a trader to press the ‘buy or sell’ button. I saw wire frame models of objects, features extracted from faces and any other visual widget that would act as a prompt for a piece of AI software. Only one person in the room had the foresight to see kittens and dogs on skateboards. ‘Great for watching porn in the office,’ he said. We certainly missed that one, but it would be another decade at least before the World Wide Web and YouTube found their way into people’s homes and offices. However, a decade is a long time in IT and I was focused on the next ten months …
… (An extract from The Ghost in the Labyrinth by Peter Kruger)
