Why Artificial Intelligence isn’t intelligent

A funny thing happens among engineers and researchers who build artificial intelligence once they attain a deep level of expertise in their field. That didn’t stop extremely smart computer scientists from making them, and the disappointing results that followed led to “AI winters" in which funding and support for the field dried up, says Melanie Mitchell, an AI researcher and professor at the Santa Fe Institute with more than a quarter-century of experience in the field. “I think AI is somewhat of a misnomer," says Daron Acemoglu, an economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose research on AI’s economic impacts requires a precise definition of the term. When AI researchers say that their algorithms are good at “narrow" tasks, what they mean is that, with enough data, it’s possible to “train" their algorithms to, say, identify a cat. Dr. Shah says he loves to debate how “AI" should be described and what that means for its future abilities, but he doesn’t think it’s worth getting hung up on semantics.