Re: We are heading toward
"So ML systems are more advanced than the expert systems of the 90s?"
Who said anything about advanced? Plenty of ML systems fucking suck. See: "Watson". I said they're radically different in design, construction and operation. Comparing the two is like comparing a search algorithm to a sort algorithm. Sure you could use them to do the same thing, but they aren't the same thing.
"When a Go program can play chess by being told the rules of the game and watching people play..."
You know that's exactly, literally how AlphaGo works right?
Well, not exactly. It spent most of its time teaching itself how to play the game by playing multiple versions of itself. Humans were too irrational; AlphaGo was instructed to optimise for chance of victory. Humans can try, but they can't always do that, so learning based on the human history of the game reached a cap in performance below that of the top players.
"a speech recognition program can learn to recognize handwriting on its own "
Given that's impossible even for humans (see: Rosetta Stone) that would indeed be seriously impressive.