Does AI Truly Learn And Why We Need to Stop Overhyping Deep Learning

AI today is described in breathless terms as computer algorithms that use silicon incarnations of our organic brains to learn and reason about the world, intelligent superhumans rapidly making their creators obsolete. The reality could not be further from the truth. As deep learning moves from the lab into production use in mission critical fields from medicine to driverless cars, we must recognize its very real limitations as nothing more than a pile of software code and statistics, rather than the learning and thinking intelligences we describe them as. Every day data scientists build machine learning algorithms to make sense of the world and harness large piles of data into marketable insights. As guided machine assistance tools, they operate much like the large classical observation equipment of the traditional sciences, software microscopes and telescopes onto society.