What is AI?

Good,  extensive,  not very technical look at the question.  Intro below.

What Is Artificial Intelligence?

By Jessica Hall on April 4, 2022 at 8:00 am  in ExtremeTech

To many, AI is just a horrible Steven Spielberg movie. To others, it’s the next generation of learning computers. But what is artificial intelligence, exactly? The answer depends on who you ask. Broadly, artificial intelligence (AI) is the combination of computer science and robust datasets, deployed to solve some kind of problem.

Many definitions of artificial intelligence include a comparison to the human mind or brain, whether in form or function. Alan Turing wrote in 1950 about “thinking machines” that could respond to a problem using human-like reasoning. His eponymous Turing test is still a benchmark for natural language processing. Later, Stuart Russell and John Norvig observed that humans are intelligent, but we’re not always rational. Russell and Norvig saw two classes of artificial intelligence: systems that think and act like a human being, versus those that think and act rationally. Today, we’ve got all kinds of programs we call AI.

‘AI does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically observable’

Many AIs employ “neural nets,” whose code is written to emulate some aspect of the architecture of neurons or the brain. However, not all intelligence is human-like. Nor is it necessarily the best idea to emulate neurobiological information processing. That’s why engineers limit how far they carry the brain metaphor. It’s more about how phenomenally parallel the brain is, and its distributed memory handling. As defined by John McCarthy in 2004, artificial intelligence 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.”  .... '