What is AI?

Good piece in O'Reilly.  Non technical, speculative, good thoughts.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

Mike Loukides and Ben Lorica examine factors that have made AI a hot topic in recent years, today's successful AI systems, and where AI may be headed.

By Mike Loukides and Ben Lorica June 29, 2016

Defining artificial intelligence isn’t just difficult; it’s impossible, not the least because we don’t really understand human intelligence. Paradoxically, advances in AI will help more to define what human intelligence isn’t than what artificial intelligence is.

But whatever AI is, we’ve clearly made a lot of progress in the past few years, in areas ranging from computer vision to game playing. AI is making the transition from a research topic to the early stages of enterprise adoption. Companies such as Google and Facebook have placed huge bets on AI and are already using it in their products. But Google and Facebook are only the beginning: over the next decade, we’ll see AI steadily creep into one product after another. We’ll be communicating with bots, rather than scripted robo-dialers, and not realizing that they aren’t human. We’ll be relying on cars to plan routes and respond to road hazards. It’s a good bet that in the next decades, some features of AI will be incorporated into every application that we touch and that we won’t be able to do anything without touching an application.  .... "