Maybe I&#x27;m being too contrarian but I still think this new AI thing (with Google et al. going down in the rabbit hole) is just the same as before: a dead-end.<p>The good example is how we invented planes. Or, precisely, how we failed at making flying machines for very long. We did try very hard to mimic birds, and their flapping wings. Study birds did certainly help with problems of weight, for example, but the main blocker was the flapping wings. Plane do not ressemble birds, not at all. For a long time we tried to solve the wrong problem (how to flap wings) and lost sight of the real problem (a flying machine).<p>I feel (but can&#x27;t prove) that it will be the same with robots, and therefore AI. Trying to mimic human may help incidentally but it is going to fail repeatedly. What do we want? Make some scifi become real? No, we just want helpful machines. To be helpful, they need to react fast to orders, but do they need to understand our language? They need to see and hear and smell what we can&#x27;t easily see, hear or smell, so a blind robot plugged to a network of cameras would be more helpful than a two-eyed face-shaped piece of plastique. They need to store and crunch huge datasets that our brains are not confortable with, but do they need to understand our emotions or &quot;feel&quot; them?<p>To me, the robot and AI of the near future would look like a flying phone, or an implant in the ear, or a ring on the finger, it will not look like the poor google-bullied guybot that was on the memes recently.