Oxford Economics

People love to anthropomorphize machines. You might name your car and sweet-talk it all the way to the gas station when the fuel light goes on, but you probably won't confuse it for a person. Things get trickier as machines get smarter, so it's important to remember that artificial intelligence is not human intelligence; for AI to live up to its promise we need to understand how it thinks like us, and how it doesn't. Take last week's first-ever victory of a computer over a top-level player in the ancient game of Go. "AlphaGo is clearly a form of highly tuned intelligence," says David Krakauer, president of the Santa Fe Institute, about the program that defeated grandmaster Lee Se-dol, 4-1, in a five-game series. Yet the software approaches the game differently than its human opponents.