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The 4 Fallacies of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence researchers are kidding themselves that human-level performance is within reach, argues one leading thinker. Here's why.

Credit: Phonlamai Photo/Shutterstock

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When will artificial intelligence exceed human performance? Back in 2015, a group from the University of Oxford asked the world’s leading researchers in AI when they thought machines would achieve superhuman performance in various tasks.

The results were eye-opening. Some tasks, they said, would fall to machines relatively quickly — language translation, driving and writing high school essays, for example. Others would take longer. But within 45 years, the experts believed there was a 50 percent chance that machines would be better at more or less everything.

Some people are even more optimistic. In 2008, Shane Legg, a cofounder of Deepmind technologies now owned by Google, predicted that we would have human level AI by the mid-2020s. In 2015, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, said that within 10 years, Facebook aimed to have better-than-human abilities in all the primary human senses: vision, hearing, language and general cognition.

This kind ...

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