AI hype isn’t helping anyone

Sometimes AI hype can be so silly that it distracts us from the important work of making it functional. For example, you can read Bill Gates’ paean to AI and believe that within the next five years, “You’ll simply tell your device, in everyday language, what you want to do.” Of course! And maybe you’ll issue those commands while sitting in one of Elon Musk’s fully autonomous self-driving cars that he’s been promising forever (well, for 10 years, to …