Even though chess isn't the toughest thing that computers will tackle for centuries, it stood as a handy symbol for human intelligence. No matter what human-like feat computers perform in the future, the Deep Blue match demands an indelible dot on all timelines of AI progress.
Artificial intelligence is always 20 years away.
Although I'm not prepared to move up my prediction of a computer passing the Turing test by 2029, the progress that has been achieved in systems like Watson should give anyone substantial confidence that the advent of Turing-level AI is close at hand. If one were to create a version of Watson that was optimized for the Turing test, it would probably come pretty close.
I think that the artificial-intelligence people are making a lot of noise recently, claiming that artificial intelligence is making huge progress and we're going to be outstripped by the machines.
AI has been making tremendous progress in machine translation, self-driving cars, etc. Basically, all the progress I see is in specialised intelligence. It might be hundreds or thousands of years or, if there is an unexpected breakthrough, decades.
Once computers can program, they basically take over technological progress because already, today, the majority of technological progress is run by software, by programming.
I think the first wave of deep learning progress was mainly big companies with a ton of data training very large neural networks, right? So if you want to build a speech recognition system, train it on 100,000 hours of data.
AI systems will enable doctors to diagnose diseases and treat people better, so blocking that progress is probably one of the worst things you can do for making the world better.
