What I'm struck by are the parallels to problems currently being "solved" with machine learning. Engineers can build tiny robots who can navigate a maze dozens

What I'm struck by are the parallels to problems currently being "solved" with machine learning. Engineers can build tiny robots who can navigate a maze dozens of times faster than a real mouse with far fewer errors and a perfect memory! Now, take that fact and start raising money off the claim that you can soon replace all mice and potentially rats too with robots in the next five years. These rodents will have no disease, require no food, produce no poop, and only need to be rested on their inductive charging pads overnight! We know we're close because we've solved the maze problem! That's ridiculous of course, and maybe pet mice aren't really a good stand-in for potentially useful technology. But the distance between these robot maze-solvers and a real mouse is about where we are with modern machine learning and AI. Yes, in a very narrow, extremely well-specified problem area, we have programs that can predict the next word you're going to type or transcribe speech or recognize a face. It works way faster and is 200x less error prone than a human! But of course, what errors do happen are catastrophically worse than any human would make, and if the parameters of the problem space vary in the least then everything goes out the window. And turns out the model can be trivially manipulated by malicious actors to churn out false positives or amplify propaganda or promote scams. But we're almost there, I promise.