From Narrow to General AI – Intuition Machine – Medium

The original vision of AI some 60 years ago was to build machines that can think, learn, and reason like humans. Initial optimism of achieving this in just a few years was grossly misplaced, and indeed continued to haunt AI for decades. As researchers failed to get anywhere near the flexibility and general cognitive ability of humans they turned their focus to solving very specific, narrow problems of'intelligence' -- And to this day'AI' is practiced almost entirely this way. A recent breakthrough in artificial intelligence called deep learning (DL) has been hailed as a major breakthrough-- it changes the development dynamic from having to'program' computers to'teaching' them. This characterizing has some merit, but glosses over the significant human expertise and'tweaking' required to make these systems work.