This post is inspired by the book:  Rebooting AI – Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust, written by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis, New York, 2019. Gary Marcus (see post Kluge) is a well known author and artificial intelligence entrepreneur and Ernest Davis is a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon. To oversimplify, the authors emphasize that the successes of AI are narrow and tend to be greedy, opaque, and brittle. They provide history of AI seemingly about being ready for prime time decade after decade after decade. Self driving cars are almost there, but they are not. Human frailties in driving result in a death about every 100,000,000 miles driven, but Marcus and Davis indicate that self driving cars require human intervention every 10,000 miles which is 10,000 times in 100,000,000 miles. It may be a very long time before we are ready to sign off on self-driving cars, because the progress thus far has been the easy part.

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