AI in general at the time was led by a VP and a particular group (that was AI tech specialized) under him. The initial idea came about from them. We were trying to find new ways of using AI to research new sources of crude at the time.
Another AI project I worked on there was a chemical tank use estimation and refuel application which used tank sensors, previous use history and some other metrics to pre-purchase and deliver product to keep tank reserves above a certain threshold.
I was a developer at Shell a couple years back and led a project where we were using nascent GPT-1/2 to process and search over mountains of documents. It was a fun project where I wrote a complex/fancy UI for a stratigraphic filter and indexing system...
The 'light-based' network thing kinda threw me for a second...wifi IS technically light, its just a frequency (RF) at which we can't see it and that can (somewhat) penetrate walls.
Literally none...this is just the argument of contrarians or people who've only ever worked on personal projects who take offense to real applications used by actual audiences.
Yes, I do this too...its a different thing when you are talking about your own insular project or something at a smaller scale.
The thing I was talking about was larger scale projects like the ones mentioned by the author (of the sort I work on at my day job) where you have teams of stakeholders and outside influence combined with a desire to release rapidly in an iterative form.
Software these days is just done differently in those contexts...we can't slow down enough to do what was detailed above...I just wish the world was sorted in a way or slowed down enough to do REAL engineering.