Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust

More broadly, formal logic of the sort we have been talking about does only one thing well: it allows us to take knowledge of which we are certain and apply rules that are always valid to deduce new knowledge of which we are also certain.

But the real story is how narrow Duplex was. For all the fantastic resources of Google (and its parent company, Alphabet), the system that they created was so narrow it could handle just three things: restaurant reservations, hair salon appointments, and the opening hours of a few selected businesses. By the time the demo was publicly released, on Android phones, even the hair salon appointments and the opening hour queries were gone. Some of the world’s best minds in AI, using some of the biggest clusters of computers in the world, had produced a special-purpose gadget for making nothing but restaurant reservations. It doesn’t get narrower than that.