Reality check: The state of AI, bots, and smart assistants

Artificial intelligence--in the guises of personal assistants, bots, self-driving cars, and machine learning--is hot again, dominating Silicon Valley conversations, tech media reports, and vendor trade shows. AI is one of those technologies whose promise is resurrected periodically, but only slowly advances into the real world. I remember the dog-and-pony AI shows at IBM, MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, Thinking Machines, and the like in the mid-1980s, as well as the technohippie proponents like Jaron Lanier who often graced the covers of the era's gee-whiz magazine like Omni. AI is an area where much of the science is well established, but the implementation is still quite immature. It's not that the emperor has no clothes--rather, the emperor is only now wearing underwear.