A virtual environment makes a great de-hype advisor

Opinion  In human imagination, AIs have been good for two things: trying to take over, and loving a good game. The earliest post-war AI thinkers took it almost for granted that once computers could beat humans at chess, true artificial intelligence would have arrived. Such thinking was disproved 50 years on when IBM’s Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997. Computers could be very, very good at chess while still having the IQ of a pebble.…