The problem with anthropomorphizing artificial intelligence

This article is part of Demystifying AI, a series of posts that (try to) disambiguate the jargon and myths surrounding AI. Last week, in an essay for The New York Times, famous mathematician Steven Strogatz praised the recently published performance results of AlphaZero, the board game–playing AI developed by DeepMind, a British AI company acquired by Google in 2014. While his examination of AlphaZero's findings is an interesting read, some of the conclusions Strogatz draws about the general advances in AI are problematic. "[AlphaZero] clearly displays a breed of intellect that humans have not seen before, and that we will be mulling over for a long time to come," Strogatz writes early in the article. Further down, Strogatz writes, "By playing against itself and updating its neural network as it learned from experience, AlphaZero discovered the principles of chess on its own and quickly became the best player ever."