THE FUTURE IS HERE

Ahlberg: Are Computers Outsmarting Humans?

‘In the end’ is a long time period; it’s a very long time period. Who knows, by then? And you know, these guys who claim that we’ll see the singularity by 2030… Dude, I don’t believe that at all, by any means, shape or form. Will we see smart machines being able to do smarter things with data? Sure. I think there are all kinds of great opportunities there. But in terms of over the next 100 years, are machines going to be smarter than humans just because some IBM computer can beat humans at – I don’t even know – Jeopardy? Nah. I don’t find that that’s interesting, actually. I think doing smart things with data, doing a lot of analysis and so on… But you know, these are very limited sort of things. Even if you take something that is starting to get people excited using Siri on your iPhone – it feels pretty amazing first. When I tell Siri to book a table at Harvest on Friday at noon, when I can do that, I go like “Wow, that’s pretty cool.” But computers outsmarting humans? No, not for a long time.