Scope of Artificial Intelligence

                    AI programs can do many different things. They can play games, predict share values, interpret photographs, diagnose diseases, plan travel itineraries, translate languages, take dictation, draw analogies, help design complex machinery, teach logic, make jokes, compose music, do drawings, and learn to do tasks better. Some of these things they do well. Expert systems can make medical diagnoses as well as, or better than, most human doctors. The world chess champion Garry Kasparov was beaten by a program in 1997, computers often predict share prices better than humans, and some AI-generated music sounds like compositions by famous composers. Other things, they do rather badly. Their translations are imperfect, but good enough to be understood. Their dictation is reliable only if the vocabulary is predictable and the speech unusually clear. And their jokes are poor, although some are found funny by children. To match everything that people can do, they would need to model the richness and subtlety of human memory and common sense. Moreover, programs do only one thing, whereas people do many things.

AI robots, although more flexible than industrial robots, are similarly limited. Very few can avoid obstacles smoothly, or move across uneven surfaces without falling over. Robots that plan their actions beforehand are vulnerable to unexpected environmental changes. Even if a robot performs successfully, it cannot undertake a wide variety of tasks. And its success often requires simplification of the environment: floor-cleaning robots are useful only if the floor is uncluttered. Nevertheless, AI-robots can do boring, dirty, or dangerous jobs, sometimes in places that humans cannot reach.

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