Your Future Technology

Elizabeth Spelke, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard, has spent her career testing the world’s most sophisticated learning system—the mind of a baby. Gurgling infants might seem like no match for artificial intelligence. They are terrible at labeling images, hopeless at mining text, and awful at videogames. Then again, babies can do things beyond the reach of any AI. By just a few months old, they've begun to grasp the foundations of language, such as grammar. They've started to understand how the physical world works, how to adapt to unfamiliar situations. Yet even experts like Spelke don't understand precisely how babies—or adults, for that matter—learn. That gap points to a puzzle at the heart of modern artificial intelligence: We're not sure what to aim for. Consider one of the most impressive examples of AI, AlphaZero, a program that plays board games with superhuman skill. After playing thousands of games against itself at hyperspeed, and learning from winning po...

Dr. Albert Hsiao and his colleagues at the UC San Diego health system had been working for 18 months on an artificial intelligence program designed to help doctors identify pneumonia on a chest X-ray. When the coronavirus hit the United States, they decided to see what it could do. The researchers quickly deployed their program, which dots X-ray images with spots of color where there may be lung damage or other signs of pneumonia. It has now been applied to more than 6,000 chest X-rays, and it’s providing some value in diagnosis, said Hsiao, the director of UCSD’s augmented imaging and artificial intelligence data analytics laboratory. His team is one of several around the country that has pushed AI programs into the COVID-19 crisis to perform tasks like deciding which patients face the greatest risk of complications and which can be safely channeled into lower-intensity care. The machine-learning programs scroll through millions of pieces of data to detect patterns that may be hard fo...