AI is booming, but can the benefits live up to the hype? - TechRepublic

With Google DeepMind's recent success in mastering the game of Go, Tesla's advances in autonomous driving capabilities, and voice recognition systems like Amazon's Alexa taking off, interest in AI and machine learning have reached an all-time high. Those living in the AI world in the 1980s remember what has been referred to as an "AI winter"--a time when the inflated expectations resulted in a "crash," and funding began to dry up. While it's unlikely that the current enthusiasm in AI will wane, some worry that huge attention, and expectations, about AI could have negative side effects. Some also worry about how AI is equated with machine learning--or even, more specifically, deep learning, which is a narrow subset of AI. So, what happened in the '80s?