Is AI sentient? No, but it's rapidly getting better

The media had a field day when a Google engineer recently claimed that the company's artificial intelligence technology had become "sentient." For every article joking about Skynet and HAL 9000, there was another assuming it must be true and questioning the ethics of it all. Missing in most of the coverage was any recognition of how far and fast this technology has advanced and how broadly it impacts our lives on a daily basis, in ways both large and small. It was only ten years ago on June 26, 2012 that the New York Times wrote about Google's deep learning discovery using machine learning, essentially teaching a computer to train itself with enormous amounts of data. The article was headlined How Many Computers to Identify a Cat? 16,000.