Great article! While I agree that machines are capable of outperforming humans at certain tasks, I don't expect they will ever be as advanced as human intelligence. The computer that won at Go, which you mentioned, would not be able to perform a trivial task for humans, such as route planning, since it was not explicitly designed for that purpose.
Thus, I don't think we will ever see "generalist" machines that can solve any of the range of problems humans can solve with little to no effort. Despite your suggestion that machines will be able to be able to solve problems they weren't specifically designed to address. Even through the aforementioned cleverly implemented reinforcement learning.
Nevertheless, I am reminded of Conway's Game of Life, where, through simple rules a computer program is able to demonstrate complex behavior. It is a fascinating topic, but limited in my opinion in how far algorithms can "evolve" given their strict adherence to the underlying code they are based on.
The questions is not if, but when machines will be capable of simulating human thinking. I am sure that within 30-50 years, we will see incredible things being done by machines. the robotization will replace 70% of the work atm humans are doing.
future generations will have an incredible convenient life, which today only the rich people with maids etc. enjoy. this will be general standard. cars will be driven, so everybody will be transported like a celebrity and there is no need to drive yourself! robots will clean our houses and will buy everything (food etc.)
So what will be left for us humans to do, if almost every aspect of life will be done by machines for us?
I see the following areas for our personal life:
Sport/ Fitness
Art / Philosophy
Reading/ Writing
Hobbys (Fishing, Gardening ec. etc.)
Education
and here will be out work heading
With the help of machines we will combat problems like ozone layer, oil running out, improving solar tech, saving the world from collapsing as 13 billion humans will be living on the earth by than and we have to prevent the extinction of animals through climate change and for example over fishing.
by than singularity might have occurred, and machines will help us improve space travel to a point where we will be able to colonize and travel distances we cant imagine right now.
and of course everybody will be paying his bills with STEEM and STEEM $ ;)
this is just what i can come up with, being a normal human with very limited brain resources and imagination, i cant think further, but we have obviously bright people here, so i would love to hear how you imagine the future!!!
Never say never! We are getting better. Maybe we just need more samples for learning.
The problem is how to collect all the relevant data to train an algorithm.
They are training on a minor subset of all samples which it will occur while finding a solution in real life situations.
My argument isn't concerning the amount of training data, which, for a machine based on deep-learning, like the one that plays Go, can be prohibitively large. It's more about the flexibility of (good) machine learning methods, which is very low. Again, referring to the specifics of deep learning, it requires a ton of trial-and-error in determining the parameters of the model. This work requires the manual adjustment of expert technicians.
Anyway, my argument was just that generalist machine learning computers, capable of solving the sorts of problems humans do every day, without specific setup and method implementation for each category of task, is way far off.
I think we will see machines in the not so distant future that are quite capable of doing anything a human can do. They will operate 100x quicker than a human and have access to all the worlds data instantly allowing them to learn at an incredible pace.