The future of Artificial Intelligence, and what it could tell us about being human - Firstpost

The notion of artificial intelligence is something which has long excited technological society. Among the various stories constructed around it are (as in the film Terminator) those of robots ruling the world with humans fighting a losing battle against them. Gary Kasparov, the world chess champion, was matched against an IBM supercomputer named Deep Blue in 1996 and 1997 under tournament conditions and lost in the 1997 rematch. Since chess is, in the popular imagination, the height of intellectual prowess, this created quite a stir and it was anticipated by the popular press that humankind would eventually have to make way for a greater intelligence -- one which it had itself created. 'AI' is a fairly broad term which includes a number of unglamorous capabilities that fall far short of defeating a reigning chess champion. Capabilities generally classified as AI as of 2017 include successfully understanding human speech, competing at a high level in strategic game systems (such as chess and the Chinese game Go), self-driving cars, military simulations, and interpreting complex data.