Fifty years ago, computers were still mostly mainframes and the best, most expensive marketing started with mailed (not emailed) surveys, laboriously entered into centralized computers. Once data processing was completed hours later, you might get a small idea of what several hundred people thought about a new product or new variation of an old product.
AI was in its infancy – just becoming a thing. More often than not, scientists referred to “Neural Networks” as a promising technology that might one-day rival human intelligence.
But mostly it was science fiction.
Today, we take for granted that algorithms are smart enough to know what we want before we know we want it.
