Microsoft speaks to the ethics of AI

To showcase the latest in artificial intelligence, Microsoft recently hosted an "underground" tour, two days' worth of virtual reality demos, product prototypes, programming and platform innovation, research news and philosophical musings on the future of AI from technological, social and business perspectives. AI progress can be attributed to a number of factors, including advancements in processing power, powerful new algorithms, data availability, cloud computing, and machine and deep learning capabilities. One of the more compelling milestones that furthered the cause for many applications was Microsoft's achievement late last year of error rates that are on par with, if not better than, human benchmarks – under 5.9 percent for speech recognition and 3.5 percent for image recognition. Autonomous cars, smart homes, automated assistants, translation apps, virtual and augmented reality were all represented over the course of the event as part of the AI spectrum. But the most compelling discussions were those that went beyond technical wizardry (which was impressive in itself) to explore the social and cultural impacts of AI.