I was lucky to be able to spend most of 2010 with the team at IBM that was educating Watson, the computer that the next winter would be taking on human champions in the game of Jeopardy. It seemed apparent to me as I was reporting and writing the Watson book, Final Jeopardy--Man vs Machine and the Quest to Know Everything, that machines like Watson would change the way we manage knowledge, language and memory--in short, how we think. Computers would also be getting smaller and coming in closer contact with us, and perhaps eventually be implanted in our brains. So I took a break from non-fiction and wrote a novel about this future. That's The Boost.A bit about my history. I graduated from college with a love of Spanish and a desire to be a writer. So I moved to Quito, Ecuador, taught English and wrote fiction. I couldn't sell my stories. So I turned to journalism, starting out at The Black River Tribune, in Ludlow, Vermont. My goal, though, was to be a foreign correspondent. So I freelanced in Spain and Argentina, got a job as a reporter at The Daily Journal in Caracas, Venezuela, and later, The El Paso Herald-Post. (Much of The Boost takes place along that section of the U.S.-Mexico border.) Finally I got a job as BusinessWeek's bureau chief in Mexico City, where I stayed for 5 and a half years and where my wife and I started our family (3 boys). We moved on to Pittsburgh, where I ended up spending a lot of time at Carnegie Mellon University and delving into technology. BW sent me to Paris in 1998 to cover European technology. We moved back to New York in 2002. Four years later, I wrote a cover story on the coming Big Data economy , Math Will Rock Your World. It led to The Numerati.Shortly before leaving BusinessWeek, in December, 2009, I was visiting IBM Headquarters. Over lunch there I heard about the Jeopardy computer that researchers were building. That turned into Final Jeopardy.Through 2013, I worked with Jonathan Bush, co-founder of athenahealth, on a book about our dysfunctional health care system, and how tech-savvy entrepreneurs could disrupt it. The book--Where Does it Hurt? An Entrepreneur's Guide to Fixing Health Care--comes out in May, 2014, a week before The Boost.We live in Montclair, NJ, and our sons are in Pittsburgh, Madison, Wi, and Seattle.