What Artificial Intelligence Still Can't Do

Modern artificial intelligence is capable of wonders. It can produce breathtaking original content: poetry, prose, images, music, human faces. Last year it produced a solution to the "protein folding problem," a grand challenge in biology that has stumped researchers for half a century. Yet today's AI still has fundamental limitations. Relative to what we would expect from a truly intelligent agent--relative to that original inspiration and benchmark for artificial intelligence, human cognition--AI has a long way to go. Critics like to point to these shortcomings as evidence that the pursuit of artificial intelligence is misguided or has failed. The better way to view them, though, is as inspiration: as an inventory of the challenges that will be important to address in order to advance the state of the art in AI.