Computer scientist and award-winning author Melanie Mitchell has thought a lot about artificial intelligence — how it works in its many forms, how “intelligent” AI really is, how it might impact science and society at large, and what an AI-shaped future may bring. During a recent lecture that she delivered as part of the National Academy of Sciences’ Distinctive Voices program, Mitchell — a professor at the Santa Fe Institute — explored the tumultuous past, confusing present, and uncertain future of AI.

Read some excerpts:

“There are many different kinds of technologies that use what’s called artificial intelligence, ranging from chess-playing machines to self-driving cars to chatbots and so on. But artificial intelligence is also a scientific study of intelligence — more generally understanding the nature of “intelligence” in humans and machines, and for me, really understanding what it is to be human. What it is about our own intelligence that perhaps cannot be easily captured in machines.”

“These systems don’t learn like we do. They learn based on statistics of the data they have, and if there’s some cue in the data that will give them the right answer, they don’t care if it really has anything to do with the thing they’re supposed to be learning.”

“I wrote a little piece on this for Science recently, asking how do we know how smart these systems are. And my conclusion was that it’s really hard to say, because they have this kind of weird mix of being very smart and very dumb, and we don’t know what the right tests are to give them. There’s a famous maxim in the AI world called Moravec’s Paradox, and he said back in 1988 that ‘it’s comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult-level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a 1-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility’ — and I would add common sense.”

“I think we have a lot of work to do to make these systems more trustworthy, but it’s possible that they will indeed revolutionize science and medicine. We’re already seeing revolutions with humans working together with AI for all kinds of scientific discoveries … I think these tools could help us expand our own creativity, and I do think that AI will help us and is already helping us understand the general nature of intelligence. It’s really testing our theories about what intelligence is, and what it isn’t, and it can help us appreciate more what it is to be human and appreciate our own intelligence.”

“My biggest questions on the future of AI: One — In order to be more useful, trustworthy, transparent, and safe, how can AI learn to better understand our world, our values, our intentions, etc. And two —Can we develop the scientific tools to understand AI?”

“The future is not inevitable, but ours to create! I’ll end by quoting from an AI researcher from Canada, Sasha Luccioni, who said in a talk, ‘AI is not a done deal. We’re building the road as we walk it, and we can collectively decide what direction we want to go in, together.’ I think those are really wise words, and I hope that we can build an AI that really is good for humans, and not necessarily for machines themselves.”