I agree with Douglas Hofstadter that today’s AI isn’t true AI because it can’t really think, but the machines we have (and are soon to have) possess an amazing utility. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, authors of The Second Machine Age, believe as most do, that the near-term Computer Age will be rocky, but they’re more sanguine about long-term prospects. They see the Google Glass as half full. An excerpt from their new Atlantic piece:

“Today, people with connected smartphones or tablets anywhere in the world have access to many (if not most) of the same communication resources and information that we do while sitting in our offices at MIT. They can search the Web and browse Wikipedia. They can follow online courses, some of them taught by the best in the academic world. They can share their insights on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and many other services, most of which are free. They can even conduct sophisticated data analyses using cloud resources such as Amazon Web Services and R, an open source application for statistics.13 In short, they can be full contributors in the work of innovation and knowledge creation, taking advantage of what Autodesk CEO Carl Bass calls ‘infinite computing.’

Until quite recently rapid communication, information acquisition, and knowledge sharing, especially over long distances, were essentially limited to the planet’s elite. Now they’re much more democratic and egalitarian, and getting more so all the time. The journalist A. J. Liebling famously remarked that, ‘Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.’ It is no exaggeration to say that billions of people will soon have a printing press, reference library, school, and computer all at their fingertips.

We believe that this development will boost human progress. We can’t predict exactly what new insights, products, and solutions will arrive in the coming years, but we are fully confident that they’ll be impressive. The second machine age will be characterized by countless instances of machine intelligence and billions of interconnected brains working together to better understand and improve our world. It will make mockery out of all that came before.”