I sat in the meeting room filled with other engineers and stared at the projection screen. Like a newborn child, I couldn’t understand most of what I was looking at or hearing. I recognized almost none of the acronyms and comprehended little of the discussion that was happening. An intern, taking a break from his Ph.D. program to spend a few months at our company, was presenting the results of a summer’s work. He had done something impressive with deep learning (a branch of machine learning and artificial intelligence), building some incomprehensibly effective solution for some mind-bogglingly challenging problem. Though I could somehow tell that he was competent and effective, the details of what he had done were almost completely lost on me. My job title was Senior Deep Learning Computer Architect. Technically, I was supposed to know what was going on.
I found myself in that predicament partly because I took a ten-year sabbatical from my employer, a company that I had busted my balls to make successful. Ten years of sabbatical would leave anyone a little rusty. Sure, I spent some of those ten years practicing various forms of engineering, but I was mostly focused on getting a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, which involved a lot of talking to people about their mothers (and fathers). As my doctoral research was coming to an end, I began to study deep learning. Then, once I had…
