What is Artificial Intelligence?

The Facts

• WHAT IS AI? Artificial intelligence, AI, is simply non-biological intelligence. Intelligence is often defined as the ability to accomplish goals. Early AI systems, like the one that first beat humans at chess, had skills programmed by humans, while today's best AI instead learns its own skills from large amounts of data.

• CURRENT USES: Early AI had a narrow skill set, say chess-playing or speech recognition. Today, AI is getting gradually broader skills, and like human intelligence, it's now used in every industry. AI advises us with chatbots and virtual assistants, and recommends who should get a job, a loan, or parole. AI helps us write and translate, entertains us with art, music and poetry, and perhaps tricks us with deepfakes. It dominates trading on Wall Street, diagnoses disease, and accelerates science. Online, AI recommends what ads, products, social media posts and search results to show us, and what to block or filter as spam. On the road, AI supports ride-sharing, navigation, traffic management, and autonomous vehicles. It powers ever more powerful surveillance and ever more autonomous weapons.