Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Once and for all we answer the question: what is artificial intelligence?

It was the summer of 1986, and I was sitting in an office of a government manager several layers of the bureaucracy above me. There were other people in the room and they were discussing what was a red-hot technology topic for that day:

Expert Systems

These systems were at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence. We just had to get into that technology. There was no other reason than the technology imperative, but that never stopped a government bureaucracy before. Anyways, the conversation dragged on and ventured into the question,

What is artificial intelligence?

Let me answer that question once and for all (sounds a bit arrogant, but hey, this is my blog so I can write what I want to write).

Artificial intelligence is a field of research where people try to make machines act more like intelligent people.

Okay, that is it. Okay, a little explanation. At one time, the idea of a thermostat, you know the thing in the house that husbands and wives and kids fuss about it being too hot or too cold, was artificial intelligence research. Think about it: the device would make the room warmer when it was too cold and cooler when it was too warm. That is a pretty intelligent act, the kind of thing that intelligent people do. Today, a thermostat is a simple control mechanism. No one gives it much thought except for the aforementioned family discussions.

This week, IBM’s computer and software is winning at Jeopardy. It is beating some of the best Jeopardy champions of all time. It is the product of years of artificial intelligence research in natural language understanding and database query.

Today, Google’s search finds all sorts of interesting things on the web based on simple search items. That too is the product of years of artificial intelligence research. Such searching is so commonplace that people complain about it.

Consider anti-lock brakes. They tap on the breaks many times a second to prevent an automobile from skidding while still stopping safely. That is pretty darn smart. Only an intelligent person with quick feet and a quick mind could do that. Well, it came out of artificial intelligence research, and it is commonplace now on cars.

Then there are those noise-cancelling headphones. They ignore ambient noise and let music come through nice and clear. Again, that is pretty darn good intelligent behavior.

I could go on for a long time with examples of things that were once artificial intelligence research but are now part of controls, mechanics, signal processing, search engines, and so on. AI researchers are studying more things today to see if they can have machines act more like intelligent people.

Note, the goal is not to make machines act like intelligent people but more like intelligent people. I doubt we will ever have machines act like people. At least I hope we don’t. I wouldn’t want to watch a thousand computers in my house arguing about where to set the thermostat.