artificial intelligence the noun project

The Future of Life Institute‘s tagline sums it up in succinct fashion: “Technology is giving life the potential to flourish like never before…or to self-destruct.” Humans are the creators, but will we always have control of our revolutionary inventions? Scientists reckon there have been at least five mass extinction events in the history of our planet, when a catastrophically high number of species were wiped out in a relatively short period of time. In many unforeseen ways, AI is helping to improve and make our lives more efficient, though the reverse degeneration of human economic and cultural structures is also a potential reality. John McCarthy, who originally coined the term “Artificial Intelligence” in 1956, famously quipped: “As soon as it works, no-one calls it AI anymore.” While science fiction often portrays AI as robots with human-like characteristics, AI can encompass anything from Google’s search algorithms to IBM’s Watson to autonomous weapons. It can be found in vacuum cleaners, cars, lawnmowers, video games, Hollywood special effects, e-commerce software, medical research and international finance markets – among many other examples. Siri, Google Now, and Cortana are obvious examples of artificial intelligence, but AI is actually all around us.

We use artificial intelligence all day, every day. While AI seems like a futuristic concept, it’s actually something that many people use daily, although 63 percent of users don’t realize they’re using it. Arbib advanced the notion that the brain is not a computer in the recent technological sense, but that we can learn much about brains from studying machines, and much about machines from studying brains. Artificial Intelligence pursues creating computers or machines as intelligent as human beings. Alas, this claim has become a bit of a “joke” over the years, as the modern computers are gradually replacing skilled practitioners in fields across many industries such as architecture, medicine, geology, and education. In the early 20th century, Jean Piaget remarked, “Intelligence is what you use when you don’t know what to do, when neither innateness nor learning has prepared you for the particular situation.” A 1969 McKinsey article claimed that computers were so dumb that they were not capable of making any decisions and it was human intelligence that drives the dumb machine. While these two artificial entities do not exist, the algorithms of AI have been able to address many real issues, from performing medical diagnoses to navigating difficult terrain to monitoring possible failures of spacecraft. Mention Artificial Intelligence (AI) and most people are immediately transported into a distant future inspired by popular science fiction such as Terminator and HAL 9000.

Artificial intelligence the noun project