Artificial intelligence (AI) has captured the public’s imagination for over 60 years, but it has proceeded in fits and starts leading to what has become known as an “AI winter” – a long period of diminished research and funding activity. Until recently, the conventional wisdom has been that new algorithms were the limiting factor in making steady progress towards artificial intelligence. However, recent advances in machine learning, have established that historical algorithms in conjunction with high-performance computers can be used to achieve nearly human-level performance on diverse tasks such as image and speech recognition, language translation, and video game play. In each of these instances rapid progress was facilitated by the […]

There has been a tremendous amount of press on the astonishing advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and the negative impacts that it could have on our society. Former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) council member, Eric Horvitz recently published a piece about the Benefits and Risks of Artificial Intelligence. Others have commented that AI could take our jobs and even potentially kill us. Elon Musk, Tesla chief executive, called artificial intelligence our biggest existential threat at the MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics department’s Centennial Symposium in October. I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very […]

The following is a guest blog post by Tom Dietterich, current president for The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and Eric Horvitz, former president of AAAI. The first winter AAAI meeting is occurring now in Austin, Texas until Friday, January 30, 2015.  Discussions about Artificial Intelligence (AI) have jumped into the public eye over the past year, with several luminaries speaking publicly about the threat of AI to the future of humanity.   Over the last several decades, AI — computing methods for automated perception, learning, understanding, and reasoning — have become commonplace in our lives. We plan trips using GPS systems that rely on AI to cut through the complexity of millions […]