AI Is Still Dumber Than a 5-Year-Old, Say Scientists

In previous columns, I've explained that there's a lot of hype surrounding the incremental improvements of the decades-old programming techniques collectively identified under the marketing buzzword "Artificial Intelligence" aka "AI." What's NOT hype is that those programming techniques (pattern recognition, neutral nets, ect.) have gotten incrementally more effective than they were in the past at playing games and performing speech recognition, automated translation, and so forth. What IS hype are the all-too-common and all-too-visible claims that AI will soon be able to perform complex tasks that involve anything resembling common sense, such as negotiating business deals, customer support and selling products. Well, maybe you'll believe a team of AI experts at Stanford University that is measuring the progress of AI. "Computers continue to lag considerably in the ability to generalize specific information into deeper meaning, [while] AI has made truly amazing strides in the past decade... computers still can't exhibit the common sense or the general intelligence of even a 5-year-old." As you're probably aware, AI is very good at playing games like poker, GO, and (most famously) chess.