Artificial intelligence
There is a common saying in the artificial-intelligence community: “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.” They call this the “AI effect.” Skeptics discount the behavior of an artificial-intelligence program by arguing that, rather than being real intelligence, it is just brute force computing and algorithms.
There is merit to the criticism. Even though computers have beaten chess masters and Jeopardy players and learned to talk to us and drive cars, Siri and Cortana are still imperfect and infuriating.
But that is about to change — so that even the skeptics will say that AI has arrived. There have been major advances in “deep learning” neural networks, which learn by ingesting large amounts of data: IBM has taught its AI system, Watson, everything from cooking, to finance, to medicine and Facebook. Google, and Microsoft have made great strides in face recognition and human-like speech systems. AI-based face recognition, for example, has almost reached human capability. And IBM Watson can diagnose certain cancers better than any human doctor can.
Fortunately, we don’t need to worry about superhuman AI yet; that is still a decade or two away.
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