Why AI is dumber than you think (via Passle)

Saudi Arabia recently declared a robot to be a citizen, which shows just how deep the misunderstanding of where we're at with AI really is. Real talk: we don't have an AI that can come close to a human level of intelligence. Personal assistants like Siri, Alexa, Cortana and Google Assistant all try to give the illusion of intelligence, with jokes and all the knowledge of the internet on tap, but there's a lot of smoke and mirrors going on. The jokes are pre-written by humans, and past the speech interface, it's pretty much a dressed-up internet browser. As the AI hype shoots up into the stratosphere, it gives the public an increasingly unrealistic view of the true applications and progress of the research.