The Current Hype Cycle in Artificial Intelligence

Every decade seems to have its technological buzzwords: we had personal computers in 1980s; Internet and worldwide web in 1990s; smart phones and social media in 2000s; and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning in this decade. Over the past decade, the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has seen striking developments. As surveyed in [141], there now exist over twenty domains in which AI programs are performing at least as well as (if not better than) humans. These advances have led to a massive burst of excitement in AI that is highly reminiscent of the one that took place during the 1956-1973 boom phase of the first AI hype cycle [56]. Investors are funding billions of dollars in AI-based research and startups [143,144,145], and futurists are again beginning to make alarming predictions about the incipience of powerful AI [149,150,151,152].