Today’s AI cannot create an algorithm that satisfies a human’s intent in all but the simplest cases. What we do have is AI that can divine insights from patterns in large data sets.
If we can boil down algorithms into such data sets, then we can make some headway. For example, if an AI-based application has access to a vast number of human-created workflows, then it can make a pretty good guess as to the next step in a workflow you might be working on at the moment.
In other words, we now have autocomplete for algorithms – what we call ‘next best action.’ We may still have to give our software some idea of how we want an application to behave, but AI can assist us in figuring out the steps that make it work.