Microsoft research chief: AI is still too stupid to wipe us out (and will be for decades) - TechRepublic

The idea that humans are on the verge of developing an artificial intelligence whose abilities far outstrip our own is ridiculous, said Chris Bishop, Microsoft's director of research at Cambridge, highlighting the many limitations of AI systems today. "This is a good moment for a little reality check," he told a public discussion hosted by The Royal Society in London this week. While recent breakthroughs in machine learning have allowed computers to become as adept as the average person at recognising faces and objects and to make huge strides in areas such as voice recognition, Bishop cautioned against assuming that machines are outstripping human performance across the board. "Yes, deep learning has achieved human-level performance in object recognition but what does that mean? It means the machine makes about the same number of errors as the human. "The reason the machine is as good as the human at this is because it can distinguish between 157 varieties of mushroom, whereas it makes all kinds of stupid mistakes that humans wouldn't make." Even some of the most celebrated examples of machine intelligence, such as a Google DeepMind system beating a world champion in the notoriously complex game of Go, need to be understood in context of the time and effort that went into building the system, he said. The world's smartest cities: What IoT and smart governments will mean for you Intelligent cities are at the forefront of the next wave of the Internet of Things. The goals are to streamline communication and improve the lives of citizens. And save a little money along the way. "[Take] the Go example, where the machine has just about crept ahead of the best human.