The Westport Library Resource Guides: Artificial Intelligence: About

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What Is AI?

While a number of definitions of artificial intelligence (AI) have surface over the last few decades, John McCarthy offers the following definition in this 2004 paper. "it 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 computer methods that are biologically observable." Continue reading from IBM Cloud Learning Hub

Benefits and Risks of Artificial Intelligence

From SIRI to self-driving cars, artificial intelligence (AI) is progressing rapidly. 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.

Artificial intelligence today is properly known as narrow AI (or weak AI), in that is is designed to perform a narrow task (e.g. only facial recognition or only internet searches or driving a car). However, the long-term goals of many researchers is to create general AI (AGI or strong AI). While narrow AI may outperform humans at whatever its specific task is, like playing chess or solving equations, AGI would outperform humans at nearly every cognitive task. Continue reading from Future of Life Institute