The Future of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Is Open

This is a guest post by author William Hertling. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect those of his employer, the IEEE, or IEEE Spectrum. At South by Southwest Interactive last month, I debated the future of artificial intelligence with my co-panelists. The roboticist on the panel argued that AI is an intellectually challenging field where the problems are difficult, and therefore can be solved only by highly intelligent people working on obscure mathematics and algorithms. The future, he argued, will look much like the past: a series of incremental, hard-won improvements in very narrow fields.