How AI touches our everyday lives

In the NewYork Post article "The machine age", Peter Norvig traces the progress of Artificial Intelligence over the years. He cites interesting examples of how we are already using applications that utilize AI -

* Spam filtering programs using A.I. learning and classification techniques correctly identify over 99.9% of the 200 billion spam e-mails sent each day. 

* Your Android smartphone can recognize your speech and transcribe it into words quite accurately, despite your “New Yawk” accent and the honking cabby passing by on the street behind you. 

* A.I. chess programs play at the level of top human champions (defeating the world champion 40 years after Simon’s prediction, not 10). IBM’s Watson computer will eagerly take on “Jeopardy!” champs starting tomorrow. In checkers, an A.I. program has achieved perfection — it can play flawlessly and it proved for the first time that checkers always results in a draw if both sides play correctly. 

* With Google’s machine translation system, you type (or speak) a sentence in any of 58 languages and see (or hear) a translation into your desired language. The automated learning techniques in this project allow a new language to be added in two weeks of work rather than the two decades it previously took. 

* Your Microsoft Kinect can recognize human motion and gestures well enough that you don’t need a video game controller anymore. 

* Google’s prototype self-driving cars cruised a continuous 1,000 miles of winding highways and city streets without a single intervention from their human drivers. But autonomous vehicles are nothing new — unmanned drone aircraft have been used throughout the last decade in war zones, and modern airline autopilots are perfectly capable of flying a plane from liftoff to landing (but the human pilots usually prefer to do some work themselves). 

* A.I. systems approve credit card transactions, insurance applications and claims and loan applications, while detecting fraud and calculating risk; they route billions of phone calls and Internet connections while relieving traffic jams and detecting suspicious behavior; they make stock trades better than humans (unfortunately we learned in 2008 that that wasn’t a high enough standard).