You may have asked Siri a thousand questions, but it looks like Jeff Bezos’ Amazon Echo will be the tech that makes Artificial Intelligence (AI) an intimate part of your life. Maybe the Echo, with its Alexa tech, isn’t technically AI — not the kind Elon Musk is worried about anyway — but the act of using this consumer-grade AI is the stuff of science fiction. You ask, she answers. You want, she delivers. So what does the man who has brought the Echo into the world think about the great debate about whether machines are smarter than people?
Bezos needed just one sentence at this week’s Vox Media Code Conference to ease the concerns of people who think their intelligences will soon be eclipsed by code. Not to say the day will never come, but it’s not imminent. Humans are much more efficient at learning, Bezos says. Then he offers this nutshell example of how the human capacity for learning is superior: “We don’t have to drive a million miles to learn how to drive a car, but computers do.”
