Building machines to be more like us

The role of artificial intelligence or AI in business has progressed from initial sci-fi notions of movie robots and talking doors. In a world where human-machine interface technologies are evolving at quantum speed and one where talking doors are very much a reality, the more imperfect and almost human the next generation of AI can be, the more "perfect" it becomes. We can now use emerging AI tools to deduce whether social media outputs – tweets, Flickr images, Instagram posts and more – are being generated by so-called software bots programmed by malicious hackers or whether they indeed are being made by genuine humans. The central notion here is that computers are still slightly too perfect when they perform any task that mimics human behaviour. Even when programmed to incorporate common misspellings and the idioms of local language, AI is still too flawless.