What Is AI?

The Challenge of Defining AI

A good working definition of Artificial Intelligence was floated over ten years ago by Stanford University Computer Science professor Nils Nilsson, a pioneer in the AI field:

“Artificial intelligence is that activity devoted to making machines intelligent, and intelligence is that quality that enables an entity to function appropriately and with foresight in its environment.”1

Writing in Forbes Magazine, Bernard Marr provides more historical perspective on the notion of defining what constitutes AI:

John McCarthy first coined the term artificial intelligence in 1956 when he invited a group of researchers from a variety of disciplines including language simulation, neuron nets, complexity theory and more to a summer workshop called the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence to discuss what would ultimately become the field of AI. At that time, the researchers came together to clarify and develop the concepts around “thinking machines” which up to this point had been quite divergent.2

With this useful working concept of a Thinking Machine, a further refinement of the types of AI is still desirable, given the panoply of technologies that are currently deployed or are on the proverbial drawing board. For the purposes of this article, an Artificial Intelligence program or application will include at least the following elements:

1. The ability to identify data, either through computer language or audio-visual and other “real world” inputs;

2. The ability to store data or seek out data from networked sources;

3. A logic function that allows the program to sort, filter and build hierarchies of data;

4. A machine learning algorithm giving the program the ability to make predictions and to change results based on past experience.

People who have used the United Airlines robotic voice assistant, Ted, have experienced a form of AI that can recognize human language and learn from aggregated chats how to direct consumer queries. PayPal, banks, and other financial services use AI programs to detect patterns in commerce that suggest credit card fraud.3 We are not talking about the types of AI on display in sci-fi movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the computer HAL seeks to take over a space mission,4 although such types of sophisticated programs may become real in our lifetimes.

Given the evolving status of the AI industry, it’s interesting how quickly we have come to expect perfection from thinking machines. We seem to live in an environment where every mistake made by a robot or automated vehicle resulting in human injury is widely chronicled and publicized, leading the public to mistrust new technologies that appear to be held to “zero tolerance” standards.5 Yet another dimension of data is not simply quality, but the sheer number of inputs.