How Intelligent Is Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial intelligence, or AI, Shieber agrees, “has suffered from grandiose claims, premature predictions, and media hype.” For the past 30 years, Sunday supplements have carried stories hinting, even promising, that walking, talking, thinking computers were just around the laboratory corner. Measured in terms of machines as smart and emotional as Star War’s R2D2, AI falls short. However, “reasonable and limited goals have been achieved,” Shieber believes. “For example, two to three years ago computers could not take dictation; now they can.” However, if you want to talk to a machine, you have to speak one word at a time. The software cannot yet separate words in a continuous monologue. “But by next year, machines that take continuous dictation should start to move from the laboratory to the marketplace,” Shieber says. “Such systems will improve the present ones, which already are a boon for those suffering repetitive strain injuries, like carpal tunnel syndrome, which make typing pai
