The Big Question: What Is Artificial Intelligence?
Tell AI apart from ordinary computing: AI makes judgment calls on tasks that have no exact recipe.
So “a machine doing a person’s work” can’t be what AI means.
A sharper test
Some tasks come with a recipe. Others make you guess.
Exact recipe
Fixed steps that always give the right answer.
- Adding numbers
- Finding a price
- Checking whether a word is in the dictionary
Fast and reliable. It never has to decide anything.
Judgment call
Nobody can write down every right answer in advance.
- Is that your face, in bad light, with new glasses?
- What’s the best chess move, when there are more possible games than atoms?
- Did “teh” mean “the” or “tea”?
Weigh it up, and pick the most likely answer.
The territory of AI
That is artificial intelligence: building machines that do things that would take intelligence if a person did them, like recognising, reasoning and using language.
How a machine gets good at judging is what the rest of this course is about.
Key takeaways
- AI is about building machines that do things that would take intelligence if a person did them.
- The tell: there is no exact recipe for the task, so the machine has to make a judgment call.
- Following a fixed recipe is not AI, however useful it is. Calculators replaced human “computers” without being intelligent.
- Judging means AI can be wrong, in a way a calculator never is.
Check your understanding
Go deeper (more technical)
The name "artificial intelligence" comes from a 1955 proposal by John McCarthy and colleagues for a summer workshop at Dartmouth College. That 1956 workshop is usually counted as the birth of the field.
Strictly speaking, AI programs are step-by-step instructions too. The difference is what the steps produce: a best guess with no guarantee, for problems where a guaranteed answer is unknown or far too slow to compute. Chess does have an exact recipe in principle (check every possible game), but running it would take longer than the age of the universe.
The line also moves. Once machines do something reliably, people tend to stop calling it AI. Chess was once the showpiece of machine intelligence and is now "just search". This is known as the AI effect.