Econtalk: Artificial Intelligence still not that intelligent

Great conversation with NYU artificial intelligence expert Gary Marcus by Russ Robert on EconTalk puts our progress on AI in perspective.

TL;DR: Progress on artificial intelligence as we know it today is almost all the result of brute force and not actual intelligence.

people have always been saying it's [AI] 20 years away. And they were saying it was 20 years away in 1955 and they're saying it now. And so people always think it's just around the corner. The joke in the field is that if you say it's 20 years away, you can get a grant to do it. If you said it was 5 years away, you'd have to deliver it; and if 100 years, nobody's going to talk to you.

Anyone who has ever worked in academic research knows exactly what he's talking about.

Worth a listen for those looking for a bit of nuance behind the public fears of people like Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking & Infosec Taylor Swift worried about AI destroying the human race.