I can understand the Star Trek dream of truly intelligent assistants, but we've been at it for nearly ten years and it hardly feels like the needle has moved. Despite the enormous advances in machine learning as a field over the past few years, AI assistants have mostly just gotten better speech-to-text and text-to-speech, and more developer support. I wouldn't expect a Star Trek "Computer" within the next 50 years at least.

The alternate (much more banal) explanation for the current prevalence is 1) a cynical data-grab on the part of companies, and 2) the devices are cheap and novel for consumers. In other words, it's not that they're creating such great value, but that companies have learned to embed their data-vacuums in what amount to toys.

That prediction really assumes the technology stops progressing at its current rate, which may or may not happen (are we going to hit a wall soon?).

I don’t subscribe to the just a data grab theory, that is incredibly cynical. Also, even a simple device is useful if it’s cheap enough (“Alexa play space unicorn” is really useful for us parents).

Compared to 1966's Eliza we've made good progress: speech to text and text to speech provide a better interface and work good enough (accents are still a big problem though), we can map between many equivalent commands automatically instead of requiring someone to account for all variants manually, and tools like Google's knowledge graph allow answering questions about most simple facts.

Still, that's about all of our progress in 50 years (in production ready, deployed systems). Estimating that we need another fifty years seems fair.

My point is that none of those improvements bring us meaningfully closer to general intelligence. It's all surface-level stuff. Important surface-level stuff, but nevertheless. I don't see much progress in the actual hard part of creating a truly helpful AI assistant.

That progress has mostly come in the last 10 years, not 50. Before that we were just doing it wrong.

That doesn't mean we won't do it wrong for the next 30 years, or that we are doing it right right now.

We have to account for accelerating progress, but I'm not sure that's enough to bring us much closer than 50 years away

Sure, we could hit another wall, deep learning could be a false peak, etc. On the other hand, it could just keep going. Tech companies make bets on this, and if they were conservative they wouldn’t be tech companies.

For me, the really big (and deal-breaking) difference between these "assistants" and Star Trek is that the Star Trek computer doesn't send recordings of you off to the Ferengi homeworld for analysis. We wanted a computer in our homes we can talk to. What we got is a wiretap, and a bunch of guys sitting around stroking their lobes as they gather intelligence on us.