My impression is that the current AI hype cycle is no different from the last one, and is likely to result in the same disillusionment as always happens. Self-

My impression is that the current AI hype cycle is no different from the last one, and is likely to result in the same disillusionment as always happens. Self-driving cars are foundering because of the same problem that always sinks things that are sold as AI: We've still got zero idea how to program a computer to introspect and reason independently. Not even the foggiest. So we invariably fall back to an unmaintainable rat's nest of hand-coded rules when the time comes to implement the very core of the system. And then distract people by hyping up whatever fancy new technology (Stacks of NVidia GPUs let us fit hypersurfaces in lots more dimensions than we could on a single Xeon!. . . err, that's not marketable, let's call it "deep learning" instead.) is being plugged into that core. The deeper issue is that people hear the term AI and invariably think "artificial general intelligence". You can try and walk that back all you want with disclaimer upon disclaimer, but it's kind of silly to even try. If you're describing something as Artificial Intelligence, of course people are going to think that you're claiming to have built something that is (1) Artificial, and (2) Intelligent. And, let's be honest, that's probably what they were trying to imply all along. If they wanted to describe the technology as "really really amped up parameter estimation", they'd have stuck with the term we already have for that: Machine Learning.