The Future is Now Smartlogic

About two weeks ago, I saw an article (actually, one of my colleagues posted it on our intranet) from the MIT Technology Review about the limitations of Artificial Intelligence. The article is here for those of you who want to read it in full, but the fundamental concept is; while AI has made great strides in the last 20 years or so (see the recent win by Google's AlphaGo over Lee Sodol, who is thought to be one of the best Go players of all time), it is still fundamentally inadequate in one respect – we have not yet built a machine that can carry on a conversation with anything remotely approximating human facility. Quite simply, the computer does not understand the meaning of words that it is using and is therefore unable to use them intelligently. The reason for this, according to the article, is that "words often have meaning based on context and the appearance of the letters and words." It's not enough to be able to identify a concept represented by a bunch of letters strung together.