It's fun to watch, but a breakthrough in machine intelligence?
In a breakthrough for Saudi intelligence the device was reportedly handed over by a double agent.
Others are skeptical, saying that truly useful machines await an artificial intelligence breakthrough that yields vastly more flexible perception.
Yet personal computers that can see you, hear you and respond would be a breakthrough, bringing artificial intelligence into the mainstream.
Two counterterrorism officials based in Europe said that an intelligence breakthrough pointing to such a renewed threat had come about six weeks ago.
Some trivial tasks for human drivers — like recognizing an officer or safety worker motioning a driver to proceed in an alternate direction — await a breakthrough in artificial intelligence that may not come soon.
The researchers behind the development said that it represents a breakthrough in artificial intelligence capable of learning from scratch without being fed instructions from human experts – the classic method for chess-playing machines such as IBM's Deep Blue computer.
He said that the Special Purpose Team officer concurred that "on-the-spot" use of LSD in field questioning "would have broadened greatly this valuable intelligence breakthrough, and on a most secure basis, since the subjects were too simple, too ignorant, to have any idea what was going on".
"Unless there is a huge breakthrough in artificial intelligence, having the human being on site, being able to make scientific decisions on the fly, in real time — there is really little substitute for that," said Jim Logan, a former chief of medical operations at Johnson Space Center in Houston.
"The question for me," said Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Delaware Democrat who is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, "is, Do we have enough time to do this right?" Short of an intelligence breakthrough, that decision may ultimately depend on something ranging between an educated guess and blind faith, experts told Congress in hearings this week.
