Computers that mimic intelligence

In the 1950s AI researchers figured that if a toddler can learn to speak and understand, it should take only about five years to teach a computer the same skills. Fifty years on, there's been little progress, so I won't even try to guess when, if ever, software will emulate or embody the linguistic talent at the core of human intelligence. Of course we don't want rivals that can ace the Turing test. We want agents that can help us manage communication, organize tasks, analyze data, and perform transactions -- the very functions Apple famously imagined in its 1987 concept video, Knowledge Navigator. In the same year Apple produced that video, I interviewed Georgetown University's Michael Zarechnak, one of the early pioneers of machine translation.