I get worried when I see something like this. I'm inclined to believe a substantial number of researchers are currently being deliberately fuzzy about what "AI

I get worried when I see something like this. I'm inclined to believe a substantial number of researchers are currently being deliberately fuzzy about what "AI" can and cannot do. Why not call it algorithms and statistics? I think lay-people have a very skewed understanding of what has already been achieved through AI. They may also not understand the word algorithms but at least it doesn't make them think of Skynet. For example, if you asked a person on the street whether there exists an "artificially intelligent supercomputer" somewhere that could help you plan all aspects of a small but entertaining dinner party, they would probably say yes. They imagine that you could just ask IBM Watson to help out, and he'd tell you what to do. This is completely false. "AI" systems are very fragile, and yes, we could build something that plans dinner parties, but we'd have to start over if we needed to plan a kid's birthday party instead. It's very far from strong AI. Ten years ago when it was mostly IBM telling lies, the end result was a couple of billion dollars wasted by hapless healthcare conglomerates. That's already bad. But now we have people from MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and more embracing the term AI and relying on unfounded hype to push for funding. It would be much less sexy if we called it "Facebook/Google/etc enable unfair/discriminatory advertising by combining intensive data collection with logistic regression, sometimes in multiple layers, and with some graph algorithms thrown in". But it would be a much better starting point for a well-informed debate. I'm not trying to minimize the importance of algorithms in our world, but a healthy discussion should be based on a sound understanding of the facts on the ground, and AI hype is not helping with that. I strongly prefer the less hyperbolic terminology adopted by someone like Aaron Roth at UPenn, e.g. see the blurb for "The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design". Bonus AI rant: For the celebration of the new MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, which is a huge expansion of the arguably most important computer science department in the world, there was a discussion panel on AI consisting of MIT President Reif, Henry Kissinger (War criminal?, Theranos board member, wannabe AI expert), Tom Friedman (columnist of limited substance), and Stephen Schwarzman (business man, coined the "increased taxes on carried interest are like Hitler's invasion of Poland" analogy, brought the dough). How the heck is that the inaugural panel!?!