What is Artificial Intelligence?

In my interactions with people, I have often discovered that most of them have little to no understanding of what artificial intelligence is. Moreover people know little about what AI’s ultimate goal is. Defining artificial intelligence is rather hard as one can tell from the many definitions available online. In this article I will try to explain what AI is and what makes it difficult to define precisely.

Historically, the term artificial intelligence was coined by John McCarthy in 1956 during the seminal Dartmouth Conference that is widely accepted as AI’s birthplace. McCarthy maintains a website at Stanford that defines AI as,

It (AI) is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence, but AI does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically observable.

This definition is all encompassing of what AI is. First of all AI is a science. Its scientific goal is to understand the principles that make intelligent behavior possible. Second, AI is an engineering discipline. The central engineering goal is to specify methods for the design of useful, intelligent artifacts (Poole et al.)

In other words, we are not only interested in understanding artificial intelligence systems but we also want to engineer such systems. Engineered systems include physical agents such as robots but also include software agents. McCarthy’s definition also includes the study of human intelligence via the construction of artificial intelligence systems. The word “artificial” is in fact key in the definition because AI is about constructing and studying man-made intelligence that can aid in our understanding of human intelligence. AI is not necessarily about replicating human intelligence. In fact, to this day, we do not have a good understanding of what constitutes “intelligence” let alone “human intelligence.”

The difference between artificial and real intelligence is further discussed in Poole et al,

Is artificial intelligence real intelligence? Perhaps not just as an artificial pearl is a fake pearl, not a real pearl. “Synthetic” intelligence might be a better name, since, after all, a synthetic pearl may not be a natural pearl but it is a real pearl.

So how would you identify an artificial intelligence agent if you saw one or better yet do such agents already exist? To answer these questions we must be clear about what an artificial intelligence agent is given our definition of AI. An AI agent is an agent that acts intelligently, i.e., it makes rational decisions considering its circumstances. That is, an AI agent observes its environment and chooses its actions accordingly. For example, an intelligent agent that is hungry decides to cook instead of doing laundry.

Intelligent agents are already pervasive in our lives. They work under the hood to make our lives easier. For example, online search engines utilize intelligent agents that catalogue information making it easy for us to find it. Other agents work under the hood in our cars making driving safer. Large airplanes fly smoothly and safely because of intelligent agents monitoring the system continuously correcting the flight path. AI agents monitor our email and prevent spam from reaching our Inbox while others make suggestions of what movies we might enjoy watching according to our preferences.

Finally, even though, physical agents such as Robocop still only exist in the movies, there are many intelligent robots performing complex tasks that humans can’t possibly do. For example, NASA’s twin Mars rovers are continuously exploring a distant planet while smaller robots are used here on Earth to inspect oil pipelines and explore hard to reach regions deep underwater.

The future of AI is bright and even though the field has advanced by leaps and bounds during the last 50 years there is still a lot of work left to do. It is hard to predict what artificial intelligence will achieve in the next 50 years but I hope it will come closer to meeting its goals of constructing artificial intelligence agents while helping us understand the nature of our own intelligence.

Resources:

John McCarthy: What is artificial intelligence?
D. Poole, A. Mackworth, R. Goebel (book): Computational Intelligence, a logical approach.