The Importance of Artificial Intelligence

I was never much of an algebra or calculus person, but once I got into the kind of math where some of the foundations of computer science and linguistics converge, I really just kind of fell in love with it. And at that time, artificial intelligence was a thing and machine learning was a thing. But I remember being laughed at in graduate school when I talked about neural networks. People were like, what? Neural networks, silly, silly stuff. That's so true though. There was a period of time when neural networks were written off for dead.