Artificial Intelligence What is Artificial Intelligence

 When we hear the term “artificial intelligence,” we often think of a human-like robot or machine that is able to think, act and feel just like us. Although we have time until artificial intelligence (AI) can do things like write New York Times Best-Sellers and perform all human tasks, many forms of AI have already arrived.

In fact, most of us interact with AI every day, whether we realize it or not. We do things like interact with Alexa and Siri, talk to chatbots online, tag photos on Facebook, and listen to Discover Weekly on Spotify. The work of speech recognition, visual perception, and data processing no longer requires human intelligence, AI is capable of managing these tasks with ease.

All of these technologies are considered Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) as opposed to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). ANI is AI focused on a completing a single task (like talking or facial recognition), rather than all human tasks. AGI is the human-like AI we imagine - like Rosey the Robot who cleans and cooks for the Jetsons. As the chart below shows, experts don’t expect AGI for another 45 - 50 years.

Source: arXiv via the MIT Technology Review 

Why Artificial Intelligence Matters

Andrew Ng, Co-founder of Coursera recently called AI, the “new electricity.” He said, “just as electricity transformed almost everything 100 years ago, today I actually have a hard time thinking of an industry that I don’t think AI will transform in the next several years.” Out of all the emerging technologies discussed in this report, artificial intelligence is the tech category that will have the biggest impact on society, individual consumers, and businesses. The reason AI will be so impactful is that it promises one thing we just can’t get enough of these days: convenience.