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Welcome to Scientific Americans Science Talk posted on November 10, 2015. I'm Steve Murki. A short episode today, for which I'll turn it

over now to Scientific American's Associate Tech editor, Larry Greenmeyer. Computers have always been good at

doing things that are really complicated for us humans. Things like crunching insanely large

numbers and running complex

algorithms. On the other hand, computers have a really hard time recognizing a particular voice

or face in a crowd, something most kids learn to do before they're even out of diapers. But things are

changing fast. Over the next decade or so, machines will more easily mimic inherently

human abilities, and they'll learn to do it much the same way we do, through experience.

Experience in this case means computers will be fed data patterns over and over again until

they're able to automatically identify a particular sound or image on their own. This process is called

machine learning. To better understand the dawn of intelligent machines and what it means for our daily

lives, I spoke with Stephen Hoover, CEO of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center at a recent

intelligent assistance conference in New York City. Here's an edited version of our conversation.

We start by talking about the ongoing rapid change machine learning.

That's what's really changed over the last five years,

is that computers now have the ability to understand in much deeper ways

...