What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

Remember IBM's Watson, the AI Jeopardy! A 2010 promotion proclaimed, "Watson understands natural language with all its ambiguity and complexity." However, as we saw when Watson subsequently failed spectacularly in its quest to "revolutionize medicine with artificial intelligence," a veneer of linguistic facility is not the same as actually comprehending human language. Natural language understanding has long been a major goal of AI research. At first, researchers tried to manually program everything a machine would need to make sense of news stories, fiction or anything else humans might write.