Artificial Intelligence: Still a Long Way from Judgment Day

The 1991 sci-fi film Terminator 2 predicted that artificial intelligence (AI) software known as Skynet would become self-aware on August 29, 1997, and rapidly take over the world. Today, even as we celebrate avoiding such an extreme outcome for 22 years and counting, we're continually scanning the field for new developments in the world of AI. Read on, and listen to our podcast with GAO's Chief Scientist and Managing Director, Tim Persons, to learn more about our work in this area. AI is far from developing into anything like Skynet. That would require AI technologies with broad reasoning abilities, sometimes called third-wave AI, which are highly unlikely in the foreseeable future.