This is the closest you are going to get to something that is more-or-less accurate and that you can accept.
He is reporting that because he has to. Deep learning is not something anyone can dismiss. If Kevin Kelly thought he could downplay the massive importance of deep learning and similar technologies, or say that it wasn't AI, he would.
This is actually a fairly pessimistic article in terms of AI prediction, and yet, that title was absolutely justified.
AI is here and very powerful, and no one can deny it. People can still pretend, however, that it will never have human-like capabilities, or cannot become smarter than us (at least not in _our_ lifetimes). Give it five to ten years, human-like and beyond-human intelligence will be built, Kevin Kelly will be talking to it, and he will have to write an article about how he was wrong about everything (of course he won't admit that much).
It is absolutely safe to say that human-like AI in five years is not going to happen. Even ten years seems highly unlikely. All leading researchers in the field agree on this.
Babies are born with all the hardware to have an adult-level intelligence, but converting that potential to actual skills requires months/years for each skill of active learning, experimentation and feedback, not only reading information from the web.
That's probably a bit early. The Machine Intelligence Research Institute has collected various surveys of experts asked about this question. The one with the earliest estimates asked the question, “Assuming beneficial political and economic development and that no global catastrophe halts progress, by what year would you assign a 10%/50%/90% chance of the development of artificial intelligence that is roughly as good as humans (or better, perhaps unevenly) at science, mathematics, engineering and programming?” Of 19 replies, the median estimates for 10%, 50%, and 90% were 2025, 2035, and 2070, respectively."
Other surveys and research are described here: http://intelligence.org/2013/05/15/when-will-ai-be-created/
What is expertise today, tomorrow is passé.
It was definitely built for one specific task.
That's dumbed down of course. It's probably more like "This much of this enzyme concentration in blood, that thing in urine" "What is a 17% chance of developing some condition in the next 5 years?"
What are the alternatives? One could simply not engage in projections, which is difficult because they're so tempting. A third option is to listen to the non-experts, which doesn't seem more valuable...
This is something I struggle WRT economics. I know economists are little more than fortune tellers, but what are the other options?
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/12/06/science/201112...
There's already a hedge fund with an AI on its board. Really.
5-10 years is the default prediction for everything nowadays... We've been 5 - 10 years away from holographic storage mediums for the last 20 years...
Also:
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gel...