I work in the Research Department of a very large tech company. Like many companies, my company is having a difficult time getting employees to physically come into work. Even though there is a lot of research evidence that physical presence increases creativity and productivity and morale, my company does not enforce physical attendance for many job roles, including research. Of course, attendance is mandatory for employees in some jobs.

Part of my company’s effort to entice employees into work is our Pizza Thursday. Every Thursday, there is free pizza. And every Thursday, one or two employees are asked to give a short 10-minute Pizza Talk on any random subject. I was asked to speak and declined several times, but the guy who runs the Pizza Talks, Graham, is a good guy and I owed him some favors so I finally agreed to talk.

I gave two short stories about applied mathematics and the importance of thinking outside the box. There were about 200 people in the informal audience in the lobby of the beautiful building I work in. For my first story, I talked about my early days at UC Irvine in California. I described playing the very first reasonable chess program on an IBM 704 mainframe — an experience that astonished me and helped give me a lifelong interest in computer science.

Next I talked about Ed Thorpe, who was a professor at UCI, and how I listened to a talk he gave on the topic of blackjack card counting. And then I described how every few weekends my college roommate Ed Koolish and I would drive the 300 miles from UCI to Vegas in his 1962 blue Chevrolet Biscayne to play blackjack. The drive was a scary experience. Cars in the 1960s were often beautiful but reliability was not a strong point.

I finished my 10-minute Pizza Talk by describing the origins of my NFL professional football prediction program when I was a university professor in Honolulu, Hawaii. The program was originally called Wizard (now called Zoltar) and my predictions were aired every Thursday evening on TV on the sports segment of the local NBC network news network by well-known sportscaster Les Keiter. I appeared on the segments every now and then.

Hmmm. The moral of the story is this. When the first computers became available in the 1960s, it was a clear inflection point that would change society. The next inflection point came when personal computers became available in the 1980s. The next change-society inflection point was the rise of the Internet in the mid-1990s.

It’s clear we’re at the start of another life-changing inflection point right now — the rise of AI. How will it play out? Like the other inflection points before, some effects are easy to predict, but many effects will be surprising — both good and bad.