Machines Are Not Really Learning

It arrived shortly after Bill Gates' comments to college kids in 2004. No coincidence, it showed up when the web took off, on the heels of terabytes of user-generated content from so-called web 2.0 companies like Google and Facebook. "Big data" entered the lexicon as volumes of unstructured (i.e., text and image) data-powered machine learning approaches to AI. AI itself was just then experiencing another of its notorious winters after the 2001 NASDAQ crash known as the "dot-com bubble." No one trusted the web after 2001 (almost no one), because it had failed to deliver on promises, tanked on Wall Street, and was still stuck in what we now snigger and sniff at, the "web 1.0" ideas that launched web sites for companies and tried to sell advertising--we are so different now!