The Bittersweet Sweepstakes to Build an AI That Destroys Fake News

Autonomous 18-wheelers are now driving the highways. Coffee table gadgets are recognizing spoken English nearly as well as humans. Smartphones apps instantly translate conversations between people speaking as many as nine different languages. But for Dean Pomerleau, none of this is all that surprising. Pomerleau built a self-driving car way back in 1989, when the first George Bush was president, and it navigated private roads using a neural network, the same AI technology that underpins modern gadgetry like the Amazon Echo and Microsoft Translator.