Artificial Intelligence: Dreams, Risks, and Reality

It cannot be denied that Artificial Intelligence is having a growing impact in many areas of human activity. It is helping humans to communicate with each other, even beyond linguistic boundaries, find information in the vast resources available on the web, solve challenging problems that go beyond the competence of a single expert, and enable the deployment of autonomous systems, such as self-driving cars, that handle complex interactions with the real world with little or no human intervention. These applications are perhaps not like the fully autonomous conscious intelligent robots that science fiction stories have been predicting, but they are nevertheless very important and useful, and most importantly they are real and here today. But neither can it be denied that Artificial Intelligence comes with certain risks. Many people (including luminaries such as Bill Gates or Stephen Hawking) believe that the main risk of artificial intelligence is that it gets out of hand.