What is AI ( Artificial Intelligence )?

Today I would like to discuss on

What is Artificial Intelligence and difference between General AI and Narrow AI?

It appears to be a lot of disagreement and confusion around artificial intelligence right now.

We have been watching ongoing discussion around assessing AI systems with the Turing Test,warnings that hyper-intelligent machines are going to massacre us and equally making us feel and afraid,if less dire,warning that AI and robots are going to take all of our jobs.

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In addition to this we have also seen the emergence of systems systems such as IBM Watson,and conversational assistance such as Apple's Siri.

A lot of disturbance,

T o get to the signal we need to understand to the answer to a simple question: What is AI?

 AI: A text book definition

The staring point is easy. Artificial Intelligence is a sub-filed of Computer-science.Its goal is enable the development of computers that can do things normally done by people. -- in particular ,things associated with people acting intelligently.

If we start with this definition, any program can be considered AI if it does something that we would normally think of as intelligent in humans.  How the program does it is not the issue, just that is able to do it at all. That is, it is AI if it is smart, but it doesn’t have to be smart like us.

Narrow AI vs general AI

There is another distinction to be made here -- the difference between AI systems designed for specific tasks (often called “narrow AI”) and those few systems that are designed for the ability to reason in general (referred to as “general AI”). People sometimes get confused by this distinction, and consequently, mistakenly interpret specific results in a specific area as somehow scoping across all of intelligent behavior.  

Systems that can recommend things to you based on your past behavior will be different from systems that can learn to recognize images from examples, which will also be different from systems that can make decisions based on the syntheses of evidence. They may all be examples of narrow AI in practice, but may not be generalizable to address all of the issues that an intelligent machine will have to deal with on its own. For example, I may not want the system that is brilliant at figuring out where the nearest gas station is to also perform my medical diagnostics.

The next step is to look at how these ideas play out in the different capabilities we expect to see in intelligent systems and how they interact in the emerging AI ecosystem of today. That is, what they do and how can they play together. So stay tuned – there's more to come.