Computer scientist Michael I. Jordan, a leading AI researcher, says today’s artificial intelligence systems aren’t actually intelligent and people should stop talking about them as if they were:

They are showing human-level competence in low-level pattern recognition skills, but at the cognitive level they are merely imitating human intelligence, not engaging deeply and creatively, says Michael I. Jordan, a leading researcher in AI and machine learning. Jordan is a professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer science, and the department of statistics, at the University of California, Berkeley.

Their principal role, he says, is to “augment human intelligence, via painstaking analysis of large data sets in much the way that a search engine augments human knowledge by organizing the Web.”

We see the their value in many fields today. For example, machine learning can motor through thousands of ancient cuneiform texts that may yield valuable information but no human has the thousands of hours a year that would be required to find out. It can decipher a charred, unwrappable scroll from an ancient synagogue fire that turns out to be a portion of the Book of Leviticus, the oldest authentic manuscript found so far. It can motor through largely unchanging skies, detecting the faintest ripple, which astronomers can then analyze —making their research time much more efficient.

But ask AI what it all really means and you will not get so much as a blank stare. (Or, depending on the program, you could get a vast autobabble from the internet of various pundit’s opinions — which may be a mere distraction at the time.) Read On: