How to make AI that works, for us

Visual object recognition, speech recognition, machine translation – these are among the "holy grails" of artificial intelligence research. But machines are now at a level that the benchmark performance for these three areas has reached, and even surpassed, human levels. Moreover, in the space of 24 hours, a single program, AlphaZero, became by far the world's best player in three games – chess, Go, and Shogi – to which it had no prior exposure. These developments have provoked some alarmist reporting in the media, invariably accompanied by pictures of Terminator robots, but predictions of imminent superhuman AI are almost certainly wrong – we're still several conceptual breakthroughs away. On the other hand, massive investments in AI research, several hundred billion pounds over the next decade, suggest further rapid advances are not far away.