All the technology I’ve described thus far—robots that move boxes or make hamburgers, algorithms that create music, write reports, or trade on Wall Street—employ what is categorized as specialized or “narrow” artificial intelligence. Even IBM’s Watson, perhaps the most impressive demonstration of machine intelligence to date, doesn’t come close to anything that might reasonably be compared to general, human-like intelligence. Indeed, outside the realm of science fiction, all functional artificial intelligence technology is, in fact, narrow AI.
