Rise of the machines: has generalized AI arrived? IHS Blogs

The impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on the world must surely be one of the greatest contemporary puzzles. The spectrum of risk and the gamut of possible applications are significantly complex that almost any scenario can be envisioned, from robot apocalypse to workless utopia. The only assurance is that change is coming, and in my opinion, it is likely to be a revolution of a scale seen only during the onset of history-shifting events such as industrialization or farming. The timing is auspicious: Google AI unit DeepMind's AlphaGo has recently beaten South Korean professional game player Lee Sedol at the ancient Japanese board game Go--a game of huge potential complexity based on simple rules and considered one of the biggest challenges in AI, since it defies brute-force planning. As a milestone in machine intelligence (and good PR), it sits up there with IBM Watson's victory on Jeopardy in 2011 and IBM's earlier AI DeepBlue's victory over chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997.