Artificial Intelligence: do we know what we're doing? South Africa Today

Artificial intelligence is our shiny new toy. We're dazzled by its potential to help us make our lives more efficient, more productive…just…better. Already, AI systems seem to be getting closer to making better decisions than a human can, which is a relatively new development. Until now, while even the most advanced machine learning systems have been very good at sorting massive amounts of data and contextualising it to make sense of it, they haven't been better than us at deciding what to do with their findings. AI changes all this through one distinguishing quality: its ability to adapt its own behaviour, often in milliseconds – instead of days, weeks or years, as is the case with the average human. These AI breakthroughs are moving at such a rate that people like SingularityNet founder Ben Goertzel give us between 5 and 30 years before machines are smarter than us.