Our brains seem to have the power to do one or the other - record and remember every detail, or chunk it to higher level concepts and forget the details. We can't seem to do both. The fact that you could not fly over a city and remember every detail is not something to worry about.

Some people seem to have extreme natural wiring - a talent that seems to come out of nowhere. Like a music savant or prodigy. The uplifting news, though, is that many talented people don't have such natural wiring - but they forge a talent through thousands of hours of what's known as deliberate practice or deliberate performance.

Artificial intelligence uses a complex set of rules - algorithms - to get to a conclusion. A computer has to calculate its way through all those rules, and that takes a lot of processing. So AI works best when a small computer is using it on a small problem - your car's anti-lock brakes are based on AI. Or you need to use a giant computer on a big problem - like IBM using a room-size machine to compete against humans on Jeopardy in 2011.

Now companies tend to mine gigantic databases for insights into what might happen six months from now. That might always be valuable, but there's a different kind of value - and a competitive edge - in processing ongoing streams of data through a software model that can quickly and constantly make predictions about, say, whether a certain customer is going to defect, or an aircraft is going to run into trouble.

From about ninth grade on, I knew I was a writer at heart. I had fantasies of being a great novelist, but I thought that seemed like an iffy way to try to make a living. So I tried journalism while in college, and really liked it. But even in journalism, I've always pursued ways to be somewhat literary, whether writing a column or writing books.

High fidelity is a rich experience, and you'll put up with terrible convenience to get it - maybe it's high cost, waiting in line, jumping through hoops. High convenience is the opposite - it's a commodity, but it's cheap and easy and ubiquitous. A great exclusive boutique shop is high fidelity; Wal-Mart is high convenience. Both are hard to establish in their own way. The thing to remember about sustaining either is that you can't sit still. Some other entity will always find a way to challenge your fidelity position or your convenience position.

Anybody can develop a certain amount of talent at something. However, the supremely talented - the superstars - are people who have married a gift of brain wiring to those thousands of hours of practice, usually in favorable circumstances.