Melanie Mitchell: Thinking about artificial intelligence

Tech optimists promise that true artificial intelligence is just around the corner . . . and have been for half a century. So should we be skeptical of all the excitement surrounding so-called "deep learning" AI — or are we on the cusp of a revolution in artificial intelligence that will penetrate every aspect of modern life? And if the AI revolution really is coming, should we fear mass unemployment or even worse dystopian scenarios from the pages of science fiction? To get a sense of the current landscape of AI research, I'm joined by Melanie Mitchell.Melanie is the Davis Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, a non-profit research center for complex systems science. She is the author of six books, her latest being "Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans," released in 2019. In 2021, Melanie authored "Why AI is Harder Than We Think," which describes the fallacies that underlie overly optimistic AI predictions.