Don’t put too much stock into these overblown articles written by credulous reporters who trust the self-serving delusional optimism of people whose funding depends on dumb investors believing that this stuff is “just a few years out”. A.I. researchers have been promising grand visions of a future in which computers can do everything for us for 70 years if not longer. In reality they are not significantly closer than they were in the 80s. We just have a lot of cheap, fast, networked storage now and statistical analysis can feel like magic. But creating programs that recognize very specific patterns in totally inhuman ways using auto generated heuristics incomprehensible to humans is not A.I. and won’t replace humans anytime soon.