Opinion | Frankenstein monsters will not be taking our jobs anytime soon

Herbert Simon of Carnegie-Mellon, Tom McCarthy, and others are credited with having founded the field of artificial intelligence (AI) on the claim that human intelligence “can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it”. According to computer scientists Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, the term “artificial intelligence” is applied when a machine mimics “cognitive” functions that humans associate with other human minds, such as “learning” and “problem solving”. The goal of “machine learning” is that an ideal AI computer program should then have the ability to change itself to take actions that maximize its chance of success at performing a task.