For decades, artificial intelligence was a field full of promise but little visible progress. For the past 15 years, though, AI researchers have been making steady—and quite visible—progress in computer vision, language translation, artificial speech, exoskeletons, and more.

The successes owe a lot to progress made playing games. The turning point, 15 years ago, was when IBM’s Deep Blue beat the human chess champion. More recently, when Deep Blue’s successor software beat the human “Jeopardy!” champion, it was a sign that the jobs of so-called knowledge workers weren’t beyond the reach of computer automation. That software is being turned toward medical diagnosis.  [read more..]