A new study has shown that Australians are generally unwilling to sign off on wide-spread use of Artificial intelligence (AI), with less than a quarter of those surveyed approving of the growing technology. The study, conducted by the University of Queensland in partnership with KPMG, shows while 42 per cent generally accept it only 16 per cent approve of AI. More than half of Australians know little about AI and many are unaware that it is being used in everyday applications, like social media. "The benefits and promise of AI for society and business are undeniable," said Professor Nicole Gillespie, KPMG Chair in Organisational Trust and Professor of Management at the University of Queensland Business School. "AI helps people make better predictions and informed decisions, it enables innovation, and can deliver productivity gains, improve efficiency, and drive lower costs. Through such measures as AI-driven fraud detection, it is helping protect physical and financial security – and facilitating the current global fight against COVID-19."

It has, and it will generate even more. But there are lots of problems that narrow AI just doesn't seem very capable of. Things like conversational natural-language understanding and general assistance in the virtual world, or things like Rosie the robot that might be able to help you tidy your home or cook you dinner. Those are just way outside of the scope of what we can do with narrow AI. It's also an interesting empirical question about whether narrow AI can get us to safe driverless cars. The reality so far is that narrow AI has a lot of problems with outlier cases, even for driving, which is a fairly constrained problem.

It may be brilliant, but it's not all that trustworthy. That appears to be the opinion Americans hold when it comes to Artificial Intelligence systems. And while we may be interacting with AI systems more frequently than we realize (hi, Siri), a new study from Time etc suggests that Americans don't believe the AI revolution is quite here yet, with 54 percent claiming to have never interacted with such a system. While this proportion seems to speak mostly to the seamless integration of many such systems into our daily lives, the more interesting finding reveals that 26 percent of respondents said they would not trust an AI with any personal or professional task. Sure, sending a text message or making a phone call is fine, but 51 percent said they'd be uncomfortable sharing personal data with an AI system.