Can an AI's ability to learn tasks and apply them to new contexts make it as smart as a human being?
"We are not developing Blade Runner characters." says Dr Mariarosaria Taddeo, Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute and Deputy Director of the Digital Ethics Lab at the University of Oxford.
According to Dr Taddeo, on a scale with a pocket calculator on one end and Blade Runner's humanoid sentient androids on the other, our present AI is significantly closer to the pocket calculator.
"We are developing machines that are very efficient at one task but not at other tasks", she says.
Taddeo says that 'learning' for a machine is not the same thing as 'learning' for a human being.
"We are not talking about an evolutionary process for machine learning. Machine learning is a very high-level form of statistics and, at the same time, a very basic level of learning compared to the human one".
According to Dr Taddeo, we are developing deeply sophisticated and efficient machines but not forms of human-like intelligence.
"The type of intelligence we are developing is not even remotely close to the human intelligence, to the kind of intuitions, emotions, desires, and aspirations that the human mind has."
