Fears about robot overlords are (perhaps) premature

In “Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans,” Melanie Mitchell, a computer science professor at Portland State University, tells the story, one of many, of a graduate student who had seemingly trained a computer network to classify photographs according to whether they did or did not contain an animal. When the student looked more closely, however, he realized that the network was not recognizing animals but was instead putting images with blurry backgrounds in the “contains