This is not listening to one sound - it is listening to all the sounds, filtering out road noise and normal noise and listening for anomalies. If a mechanic could ride along with you, listen, and then tell you what was wrong with your car you’d think she was pretty smart, wouldn’t you? Far smarter than just attaching a probe to something and measuring the value.
Of course it is not true AI - and the article does not claim it is. It just does something better than almost all people can do.
Don’t get your hopes up on these. We’re plenty smart enough to solve a lot of them already - but too greedy to do so. And some people think solving them is not a good thing. Just look at hunger in America.
It is absolutely true that “artificial intelligence” is often invoked as a magic solution to problems that are purely social or political in nature, and short of ceding authority to such machine intelligence the ultimate responsibiltity will still depend upon people and their proclivities to act in short sighted self-interest. But there are plenty of problems that could be attacked and reduced by a sufficiently complex AI, such as simulation of the impacts and efficacy of propsed regulations or optimization of traffic flows by autonomously piloted vehicles that would be of great benefit regardless of ideology. But yes, as long as we have humans making decisions, greed and avarice will be part of the calculus of human society, and we will have social and economic inequalities enforced by people who benefit from them.
Stranger
Most recent long thread on this topic (the OP is about robots but thread basically just discusses AGI):
The real danger with AI isn’t the technology itself, it’s how much trust is being given to the people behind the technology. If technology is integrated into literally everything, the people who control the technology can literally control the world. We are already at the point where a technology-driven police state would be extremely easy to implement. If you live in an urban area, your actions can be tracked very easily if someone with the power has the inclination to do so. CCTVs are pretty much everywhere and it is increasingly possible to use biometrics to identify a random person in a crowd (especially as it becomes impossible to function in society without a biometric passport, license or identity card), your smartphone conveniently tracks everywhere you go, if you don’t bother with cash anymore then everything you buy is on record and when cashless societies start becoming a thing there will no financial anonymity at all. Drones will eventually be able to cover everywhere that isn’t already monitored.
Even if security advances enough to make the technology hack-proof, history has already proven that democracy is no guarantee against a despot coming to power. Elect the wrong popular, charming psychopath and they are free to enslave the population at will with little chance of anyone escaping. You can’t go off the grid if literally everywhere is on the grid. The technology we have now is exactly what every dictator in world history dreamed of having.