AI Fact v fiction An AI insider guide

‘Google fires engineer who contended its AI technology was sentient.” “Chess robot grabs and breaks finger of seven-year-old opponent.” “DeepMind’s protein-folding AI cracks biology’s biggest problem.” A new discovery (or debacle) is reported practically every week, sometimes exaggerated, sometimes not. Should we be exultant? Terrified? Policy makers struggle to know what to make of AI and it’s hard for the lay reader to know what to believe. Here are four things every reader should know.

DeepMind can learn to solve tasks without prior programming. It has been deploy ed into speech recognition used in Android phones and Google Translate

Regulation

First, AI is real and here to stay. And it matters. If you care about the world we live in, and how that world is likely to change in the coming years and decades, you should care as much about the trajectory of AI as you might about forthcoming elections or climate breakdown.