Oren Etzioni – CEO of Paul G. Allen’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and long-time UW CSE professor – writes in Wired:
“Deep learning is rapidly ‘eating’ artificial intelligence. But let’s not mistake this ascendant form of artificial intelligence for anything more than it really is. The famous author Arthur C. Clarke wrote, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ And deep learning is certainly an advanced technology – it can identify objects and faces in photos, recognize spoken words, translate from one language to another, and even beat the top humans at the ancient game of Go. But it’s far from magic. …
“Machine learning is far from being a ‘genie’ that is ready to spring from a bottle and run amok. Rather, it is a step in a decades-long (or, perhaps, centuries-long) research endeavor to understand intelligence and to construct human-level AI.”
Great essay! Read it here.