Artificial Intelligence: A Grayish Area for Insurance Coverage

2004: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency sponsors a driverless car grand challenge. Technology developed by the participants eventually allows Google to develop a driverless automobile and modify existing transportation laws.

2005: Honda’s ASIMO humanoid robot can walk as fast as a human, delivering trays to customers in a restaurant setting. The same technology is now used in military robots.

2011: IBM’s Watson wins Jeopardy against top human champions. It is training to provide medical advice to doctors. It can master any domain of knowledge.

2012: Google releases its Knowledge Graph, a semantic search knowledge base, likely to be the first step toward true AI.

2013: BRAIN initiative aimed at reverse engineering the human brain receives $3 billion in funding by the White House, following an earlier billion-euro European initiative to accomplish the same.

2014: Chatobot convinced 33 percent of the judges it was human and by doing so passed a restricted version of a Turing Test.

Almost every day, headlines showcase the most recent advancements in AI. Although many are positively revered for increasing efficiency or improving security, the advancements come with failures, too. Some are funny. Like when one company’s chatbots shut down after developing their own language. Or when a popular virtual assistant blasted music, prompting German police to break into an apartment when the resident was out.

Others are not. Some are annoying—like when a “smart speaker” experienced nearly a 100-percent failure rate in June 2017. Others are offensive, such as when a smart messaging app suggested a man in a turban emoji as a response to a gun emoji. Others are potentially dangerous, like when autonomous vehicles are involved in accidents, or when a highly touted facial recognition program was thwarted by a mask a week after its release.

To read the remainder of this article, access the PDF.