So you have
heard about this thing called artificial
intelligence. It’s changing the world, you’ve been told. It’s going
to drive your car, grow your food, may even take your job.
First off, it’s true that AI is
overhyped. But it’s improving rapidly, and in some ways catching up to the hype.
Part of that is a natural evolution: AI improves at a given task when it learns
from new data, and the world is producing more data every second. New
techniques developed in academic labs and at tech companies lead to jumps in
performance, too. That’s led to cars that can drive
themselves in some situations, to medical
diagnoses that have beaten the accuracy of human doctors, and
to facial recognition that’s reliable enough to
unlock your iPhone.
AI, in other words, is getting really
good at some specific tasks. “The nice thing about AI is that it gets better
with every iteration,” AI researcher and Udacity founder Sebastian
Thrun says. He believes it might just “free humanity from the
burden of repetitive work.” But on the lofty goal of so-called “general” AI
intelligence that deftly switches between tasks just like a human? Please don’t
hold your breath. Preserve those brain cells; you’ll need them to out-think the
machines.
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