The Long Path of AI: Destructive or Transformative?

The field of AI (artificial intelligence), to those on the outside, must appear to be an orderly gathering of intellectuals collaborating at the cutting edge of technology. The reality is a bit different. Last year, Elon Musk made headlines by describing AI as a "fundamental risk to the existence of civilization." More recently, Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggested that the answer to fears about AI was to police it and offered the example of finding a way to police the misuse of the telephone because of its possible misuse by some individuals with bad intentions rather than not inventing the phone at all. One of the biggest misconceptions surrounding AI is that most individuals think that humanity is close to it, although in fact the reality is quite different. Although a great deal has been learned about how to engineer certain narrow problems like speech recognition in ways which could not have been imagined five or ten years ago, the idea of having machines that can reason about the world in the ways that human-beings can is still implausible.