technologyreview_With so much excitement about progress in artificial intelligence, you may wonder why intelligent machines aren’t already running our lives.

Key advances have the capacity to dazzle the public, policymakers, and investors into believing that human-level machine intelligence may be just around the corner. But a new report (PDF), which tries to gauge actual progress being made, attests that this is far from true. The findings may help inform the discussion over how AI will affect the economy and jobs in the coming years.

“There’s no question there have been a number of breakthroughs in recent years,” says Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and one of the authors of the report. “But it’s also clear we are a long way from artificial general intelligence.”

Brynjolfsson points to remarkable advances in image classification and voice recognition. But computers trained to perform these tasks cannot do much else, and they cannot adapt if the nature of the task changes slightly or if they see something completely unfamiliar.