Machine Learning, AI, and the Emperor's Vest

Those of us who work in data science and artificial intelligence have a love/hate relationship with hype. We're excited by self-driving cars, machines understanding complex images, and computers beating humans at Go (if not StarCraft). On the other hand, we've heard stories of the last'AI winter' and we fear that hype (and the inevitable trough of disillusionment that follows) is setting us up for another one. We know machine learning is math, not magic, and we don't want to be left holding the bag when someone declares that the AI emperor has no clothes. As always, the truth is more nuanced.