General vs Narrow AI

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Narrow AI is where we have been. General AI is where we are going. Narrow AI refers to AI which is able to handle just one particular task. A spam filtering tool, or a recommended playlist from Spotify, or even a self-driving car — all of which are sophisticated uses of technology — can only be defined via the term ‘narrow AI’. Even Watson, IBM’s media-friendly supercomputer which can beat human experts at Jeopardy! — whilst swallowing most of Wikipedia in the process — can only be known as an example of ‘narrow AI.’ It so happens that Watson uses an expert-system approach, combined with machine learning and natural language processing, in order to be very impressive within the field of beating humans at Jeopardy! It is also to be noted that Watson is branching out into the fields of medicine and law. Nevertheless, Watson remains, for the time being, decidedly narrow, and, perhaps a little uncharitably, rather weak. Weak AI in this sense is the situation in which an AI system displays a certain degree of intelligence in a particular field, but it remains firmly and squarely very much a computer system that performs highly specialised tasks for humans, within that narrow field.