Can Artificial Intelligence Identify Pictures Better than Humans?

Computer-based artificial intelligence (AI) has been around since the 1940s, but the current innovation boom around everything from virtual personal assistants and visual search engines to real-time translation and driverless cars has led to new milestones in the field. And ever since IBM's Deep Blue beat Russian chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, machine versus human milestones inevitably bring up the question of whether or not AI can do things better than humans (it's the the inevitable fear around Ray Kurzweil's singularity). As image recognition experiments have shown, computers can easily and accurately identify hundreds of breeds of cats and dogs faster and more accurately than humans, but does that mean that machines are better than us at recognizing what's in a picture? As with most comparisons of this sort, at least for now, the answer is little bit yes and plenty of no. Less than a decade ago, image recognition was a relatively sleepy subset of computer vision and AI, found mostly in photo organization apps, search engines and assembly line inspection.