How to Hack an Intelligent Machine

This week Microsoft and Alibaba stoked new fears that robots will soon take our jobs. The two companies independently revealed that their artificial intelligence systems beat humans at a test of reading comprehension. The test, known as the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD), was designed to train AI to answer questions about a set of Wikipedia articles. Like the image-recognition software already deployed in commercial photo apps, these systems lend the impression that machines have become increasingly capable of replicating human cognition: identifying images or sounds, and now speed reading text passages and spewing back answers with human-level accuracy. Machine smarts, though, are not always what they seem.