Artificial Intelligence: Friend or Foe?

Artificial intelligence, or AI: what exactly is it? How much should we trust it? There are numerous questions we could ask regarding this issue, and many of these concerns were brought into focus several weeks ago when an Uber self-driving car struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona. The accident resulted in the first fatality from a self-driving car accident in history, and as a result, Uber and other developers of self-driving vehicles temporarily halted their testing. Self-driving cars are just one of thousands of different ways that AI and machine learning are used, and the way that we view this incident has implications for the ways in which we think about AI in the future.