How Artificial Intelligence Is Forcing Us To Answer Some Very Human Questions

Chris Dixon, who invested early in companies ranging from Warby Parker to Kickstarter, once wrote that the next big thing always starts out looking like a toy. That's certainly true of artificial intelligence, which started out playing games like chess, go and playing humans on the game show Jeopardy! Yet today, AI has become so pervasive we often don't even recognize it anymore. Besides enabling us to speak to our phones and get answers back, intelligent algorithms are often working in the background, providing things like predictive maintenance for machinery and automating basic software tasks. As the technology becomes more powerful, it's also forcing us to ask some uncomfortable questions that were once more in the realm of science fiction or late-night dorm room discussions.