AI and the future of work

AI means lots of different things to different people. But the really important development in the last decade has been the spectacular improvements in machine learning, a version of AI that allows software to exhibit cognitive capacities through training by examples. The most stunning advances have been in pattern recognition, such as voice or facial recognition, and also in cognitive performance with programs such as AlphaGo Zero, that basically taught itself to play Go better than any human players. For business, it has been called the most important general-purpose technology of our time. It overcomes the difficulty of programming tacit knowledge, which used to limit computers to reducing demand for people to perform routine, rules-based tasks.