The Hard Problems AI Can't (Yet) Touch

Who's better, Lebron James or Stephen Curry? Which country is more powerful, the United States or China? How advanced is modern AI compared to humans? Of the three ridiculous questions above, which appears most underspecified? However misguidedly, we often discuss complex, multi-faceted issues as though they were easily reduced to single scalar quantities. In the past few years, modern AI techniques have made great strides, accomplishing a number of feats traditionally associated with human intelligence. In particular, machine learning systems using deep neural networks now perform human-level speech recognition and transcription.