AI Won't Be Quite the Revolution You Expect

Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google, has said that AI "is more profound than … electricity or fire." Andrew Ng, who founded Google Brain and now invests in AI startups, wrote that "If a typical person can do a mental task with less than one second of thought, we can probably automate it using AI either now or in the near future." There have been remarkable advances in AI, after decades of frustration. Today we can tell a voice-activated personal assistant like Alexa to "Play the band Television," or count on Facebook to tag our photographs; Google Translate is often almost as accurate as a human translator. Over the last half decade, billions of dollars in research funding and venture capital have flowed towards AI; it is the hottest course in computer science programs at MIT and Stanford.