Progress in AI isn't as impressive as you might think

With so much excitement about progress in artificial intelligence, you may wonder why intelligent machines aren't already running our lives. Key advances have the capacity to dazzle the public, policymakers, and investors into believing that human-level machine intelligence may be just around the corner. But a new report (PDF), which tries to gauge actual progress being made, attests that this is far from true. The findings may help inform the discussion over how AI will affect the economy and jobs in the coming years. "There's no question there have been a number of breakthroughs in recent years," says Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and one of the authors of the report.