16 reasons why top researchers are obsessed with AI
﻿The Tech Insider has interviewed 16 computer scientists, researchers and entrepreneurs who are all working with AI to discover what inspired them to work in this technology field. For example, ﻿Yoky Matsuoka, the former Vice President of T﻿echnology at Nest, said that her interest in pursuing AI technology stemmed from wanting to create a robot that could play tennis. For every new robot, there are often hundreds of researchers and computer scientists that have spent years developing a project as part of a lifelong passion.

Shimon Whiteson is tired of puny human brains.

Shimon Whiteson

I've been very interested in computers since I was a little kid. My older brother taught me computer programming when I was five years old. I was really drawn to it because it gave me control over the computer and it was really creative.

Once you learn how to program you can do whatever you want with a computer. There are a lot of creative opportunities. It's also a really addictive kind of problem solving. So I knew from a pretty young age that I wanted to work with computers.

But then as I got older I got really frustrated by how slowly humanity was solving the fundamental mysteries of the universe. I thought the bottleneck here is that our brains are just too puny. It's too hard to think about these really big problems with our little brains so what we need to do is we need to augment our brains with something that will make them smarter. We need to make computers so smart that they can help us solve these big problems.

Shimon Whiteson is an associate professor at the Informatics Institute at the University of Amsterdam.