The Way That a Computer Could Learn About That

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The way that a computer could learn, I'm going to put learn in quotes, and we'll come back to that too. It would be through a very mechanical process of association. The most common approach is using these so-called deep neural networks which learn from these labeled images. And then the input is an image, the output is some kind of classification out of some fixed number.

Computer Scientist and author Melanie Mitchell of Portland State University and the Santa Fe Institute talks about her book Artificial Intelligence with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Mitchell explains where we are today in the world of artificial intelligence (AI) and where we might be going. Despite the hype and excitement surrounding AI, Mitchell argues that much of what is called "learning" and "intelligence" when done by machines is not analogous to human capabilities. The capabilities of machines are highly limited to explicit, narrow tasks with little transfer to similar but different challenges. Along the way, Mitchell explains some of the techniques used in AI and how progress has been made in many areas.