Microsoft Research Chief: AI Is Still Too Stupid to Wipe Us Out (and Will Be for Decades)

Chris Bishop, Microsoft's director of research at Cambridge, says warnings mankind is on the brink of developing The Terminator's Skynet and other homicidal AIs are'nonsense' and will be for decades to come. Microsoft Research Cambridge laboratory director Chris Bishop dismisses the fear artificial intelligence (AI) is on the cusp of overtaking human intelligence, and says it will continue to lag human performance for decades to come. "Yes, deep learning has achieved human-level performance in object recognition, but what does that mean?" Bishop asks. "It means the machine makes about the same number of errors as the human." Bishop stresses even vaunted examples of machine intelligence, such as Google DeepMind's Go-playing system, have to be understood within the context of the immense time and manpower invested in their development.