This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Harriet
The popularity of AI is due to the fact that people have started using the term, when they refer to things that used to be called by other names. You can see almost anything from statistics and business analytics to manually encoded if/then rules called AI. Why is this so? Why is the public perception of AI so indistinct?
But really, I don’t think we lot have a specific definition of what AI is and the confusion about the meaning of AI is made worse by the visions of AI present in various literary and cinematic works of science fiction. Science fiction stories often feature friendly humanoid servants that provide overly-detailed factoids or witty dialogue, but can sometimes follow some one or something and start to wonder if they can become human. Do you believe the existence of humanoids can happen? I personally don’t.
Although, we do have some understanding of AI and have made some progress in ‘making’ it do things for us with little to no error, like playing chess is very well suited to computers, which can follow fairly simple rules and compute many alternative move sequences at a rate of billions of computations a second. By contrast, the tasks of playing chess and solving mathematical exercises can seem to be very difficult, requiring years of practice to master and involving our higher faculties and concentrated conscious thought. No wonder that some initial AI research concentrated on these kinds of tasks and it may have seemed at the time that they encapsulate the essence of intelligence, while in-depth mastery of mathematics requires (what seems like) human intuition and ingenuity, many (but not all) exercises of a typical high-school or college course can be solved by applying a calculator and simple set of rules.
That begs the question, what is and what isn’t AI?
So I think the perfect ‘question’ to be applied should be, “what computers can’t do yet.”
Definition of AI to some, AI is about artificial life-forms that can surpass human intelligence and for others, almost any data processing technology can be called AI. And in real sense, I think none of us has a good/better understanding of what it is and what it is not, YET and maybe we never will.
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Harriet