“If computers can trade stocks and drive cars, will they soon outperform our best sales people, replace court judges, win Oscars and Grammys, buy up and develop prime parcels of real estate for their own purposes? And what will “they” think of “us”?  

The plain fact is there is no “they.” This is an anthropomorphic conceit borne of endless Hollywood blockbusters, reinforced by the gratuitous inclusion of human-like features in public AI technology demonstrations, such as natural-sounding voices, facial expressions, and simulated displays of human emotions. Each of these techniques has valuable application to human-computer interfaces, but not when their primary effect is to fool or mislead. Attempts to dress up significant AI accomplishments with human-oid flourishes does the field a disservice by raising inappropriate questions and implying there is more there than meets the eye.” Prof. Jerry Kaplan, Communications of the ACM