Recent advances in AI still have some big limitations, especially that all the benchmarks at which it has excelled are 1) synthetic and 2) end points. First, r

Recent advances in AI still have some big limitations, especially that all the benchmarks at which it has excelled are 1) synthetic and 2) end points. First, real world telemetry is very often less clean than the synthetic data presently used to train face or word recognizers. In the wild, bad lighting, poor focus, motion artifacts, occlusions, odd angles, floppy hats and unfamiliar expressions will reduce accuracy enormously when used in the real world. This often isn't a game stopper when the usage is lightweight (single picture matches, willingness to re-scan the object, patience from the user, etc). But in "live fire" situations like driving a car, the cost of misidentifying road signage, pedestrian behavior, or failing to perceive imminent risk can be very dire. In fact, good performance in synthetic situs like a lab are a LONG way from practical utility outside the lab. Second, because these benchmarks are end points, where the only objective is to put a label on each input and add them up to gain a high total score, there is little impact after a label fails, when it misclassifies an object or misunderstands a word, and has to deal with the consequence. Beyond mere benchmarks, when a situated AI is obliged to process a sequence of data and reactions to each appropriately (driving past street signs like "BRIDGE OUT" or "BEWARE OF DOWNED POWER LINES" or "DEAF CHILD") and the AI fails to understand some or all of an unfamiliar observation, unless it's also able to ask itself questions like "What ELSE might that sign mean?" or "Maybe I should slow down here because I may have misread, or because flooding is common hereabouts", the consequences of a 5% error rate on synthetic benchmarks looks a lot less favorable. IMHO, AI is still a long way from doing more than advising humans. In a great many practical use cases, I suspect AI is a nowhere near robust and reliable enough to take the reigns from the status quo.