The future of artificial intelligence

While future developments in artificial intelligence research are likely to yield useful industrial applications, in the medium term the technology may turn out to be less revolutionary than many expect. Artificial intelligence (AI) can beat humans at complex tasks like chess and video games, but it still cannot reproduce behaviors that come naturally to people, like making small talk about the weather. In his 1994 book "The Language Instinct," linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker concluded that: "The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy, and the easy problems are hard." This paradox has led researchers to divide AI into two different types: artificial general intelligence or strong AI, and weak (or narrow) AI. Strong AI means the ability to learn any task that people can perform.