Humans vs Machines: Playing field levels as AI advances

The rhetoric surrounding AI and robots have some believing that we are nearing the ability to introduce something like Joi, the AI hologram from Blade Runner 2049. While in fact this kind of advancement remains in the realms of fiction, the AI Index Annual Report 2017 shows that AI is fighting to level the playing field in the battle of humans versus machines. With Artificial Intelligence technologies being developed in a wide range of applications, the AI Index revealed several surprising insights on where humans stand in the robot vs biological brain race. While robots easily outperform regular employees in certain visual tasks, natural language processing is not yet superior to human capability. Scientist reached a major breakthrough this year, with tests revealing that the best Artificial Intelligence system recognised speech from phone call audio at 95% – neck-and-neck with human ability.