Whether something is “true” A.I. (i.e, whether it passes the Turing test or not), might be an interesting discussion… but the point is, we have now entered a totally new era — The Fourth Industrial Age — where machines are rivaling humans in a very rapidly growing number of domains… where once we humans had no competition from machines in just about any intellectual task, we suddenly have significant competition from brilliant machines, in many cases where these machines clearly outperform humans — beating the world’s grand master in the game of Go, for example.

Call it A.I. or not, right now, machines are… driving cars, flying planes, delivering beer, picking stocks better than a team of financial analysts, diagnosing disease more accurately than a team of doctors, predicting the outcome of legal cases with greater precision than a team of lawyers, winning cooking contests, recognizing patterns among billions of images in seconds, recognizing speech, summarizing articles… the list goes on…