It’s this phrase “artificial intelligence.” Ninety per cent of you just read that sentence and imagined either a) a cute robot or b) a sexy robot. This makes stories that mention artificial intelligence irresistible to you, the reader, and the press releases behind them are thus irresistible to us, the newspaper folk. There is a legitimate boom happening in the world of artificial intelligence, but it has nothing to do with the old dream of imitating the complete human mind. Machine learning is a collection of programming techniques for automating the most laborious parts of this. Indeed, machine learning often turns out not to provide any more sophistication or significant benefit than older statistical techniques did.

Source: National Post March 18, 2019 19:41 UTC