AI canât replace humans, but the technology is making inroads in more and more business sectors.
In an oft-quoted interview with Life magazine in 1970, Marvin Minsky, an MIT researcher and pioneer in artificial intelligence, predicted that scientists were about three to eight years away from creating a machine as intelligent as the average human. Such a machine would âbe able to read Shakespeare, grease a car, play office politics, tell a joke, have a fight,â Minksy said, and it would learn at such a âfantastic speedâ that it would reach genius level within just a few months.
Fifty years later, Minksyâs vision of a machine on par with the human brain still hasnât been realized â but popular AI tools, such as Googleâs search engine and Appleâs Siri, have become part of everyday life, and machines are learning how to master an array of complex tasks, from operating self-driving cars to spotting tumors to monitoring crops.