The feeling in the media is that this is already here but I suspect that is based mainly on hype, movies/films, TV series and the like as well as a good dose of ignorance about AI.
Yet clearly there are great strides being made in the world of AI apparently. Mostly this is to do with accessibility and application. The technology is improving to such an extent that it is very, very easy to use and access.
But that doesn’t mean it is becoming more self aware even if it feels it when it is talking to you as a bot. We train a machine learning model to approximate to the correct answer. It has no concept of understanding what it has been trained on.
Areas of AI called reinforcement learning or genetic algorithms go some way to mimicking how we might learn. That still doesn’t make them self aware. Our comparison is replicating ourselves whereas it is more likely we can succeed with a comparison to a simple life form.
Saying all that I do believe we will make more leaps and bounds in the future as we develop the basic structure of say, neural networks, which is still being explored and is most pure research.
We will one day make an approximation to a sentient machine but we are quite a long way from that at t present. Just watch this space.
