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The Future Is Here
How the benefits of Artificial Intelligence are actually all around us right now
Highly paid software engineers at Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft have worked diligently for decades to perfect Artificial Intelligence, known colloquially as AI. With applications ranging from self-flying airplanes to self-regulating utility systems, the promise of AI has been to deliver us from a reliance on fallible human operators and replace ourselves with algorithms that never make mistakes and never sleep.
This long road was initially mapped out by Alan Turing, a solitary genius whose far-sighted notions set guideposts in place for future generations to navigate by and whose famous Turing Test remains the summit of success for AI researchers and engineers. The Turning Test essentially said that a computer intelligence will be judged to be indistinguishable from a human intelligence when a human interlocutor cannot determine whether the responses being given are coming from a machine or a person.
Initially, however, researchers went down the wrong path. Being clever people, they automatically assumed that in order to pass the Turing Test, computers would have to provide rational fact-based responses to human interrogation. Fortunately, events of the last few years have provided a welcome corrective and software…
