In today’s world, a superficial reading of tech newsletters and startup press releases leads one to believe we are on the cusp of a machine-driven society. Indeed, “Artificial Intelligence” and “Machine Learning” have become table-stakes marketing terms, with companies like Tesla (autopilot) and Google (duplex) leading the charge toward fully automated solutions to everyday problems. However, if you take a closer look at the technologies you see they are targeted to a specific type of problem (e.g. self-driving and speech emulation) and as such the underlying algorithms are tuned to be successful within those problem spaces. That by no means reduces the impressive results achieved, but the hype around these technologies has created a false belief that anything and everything can be automated. There's a big gap of understanding.
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