Expectations for artificial intelligence are over inflated

I like Gartner’s concept of the technology hype cycle. It assumes that expectations of new technologies quickly ramp to an inflated peak, drop into a trough of disillusionment, then gradually ascend a slope of enlightenment until they plateau. Of course, not all technologies complete the cycle or transition through the stages at the same pace.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has arguably been in the trough for 60 years. I am thinking of Kubrick’s HAL and Roddenberry’s “computer” that naturally interact with humans. That’s a long trough, and despite popular opinion, the end is nowhere in sight.

There’s so much excitement and specialized research taking place that AI has fragmented into several camps such as heuristic programming for game-playing AI, natural language processing for conversational AI, and machine learning for statistical problems. The hype is building again, and just about every major tech company and countless startups are racing toward another inflated peak and subsequent trough.

The reason expectations are so high is because of breakthroughs in three broad categories: compute, data and algorithms. The compute innovations refer to general cloud services and specific improvements in processing arrays and graphics processing units (GPUs).

The availability of huge data sets has also been important for machine learning. Large labeled and annotated data sets have enabled progress in computer vision, natural language and speech recognition. There are numerous public data sets available, plus many of the larger firms are also using their own private data.

The third ingredient is advanced algorithms that with compute power and data provide responses or predictions. For example, algorithms are used to recommend movies to watch, stocks to trade and updates to include on a timeline. The concept is as old as computing itself, but suddenly vastly improved.

Or is it? While a computer beat a human chess champion 21 years ago, it wasn’t until two months ago that a different computer beat a human champion at Go. There was an impressive milestone on Jeopardy in 2011 and more recently a breakthrough regarding Ms. Pac-Man.

AI will definitely change the world, but just don’t hold your breath, at least not regarding general purpose AI. Specialized AI, such as self-driving cars, is progressing quickly. The general AI stuff is almost useless.

I have yet to find any general AI solution to be helpful. For example, Google Assistant often suggests to me the best time to leave for the airport. It’s invariably wrong.