What is artificial intelligence?

That's a surprisingly interesting and complex question.

There's a couple of definitions that I want to give you a couple.

Wikipedia says artificial intelligence is intelligence exhibited by machines.

It's kind of a very coincidental definition.

You look at a machine, oh it seems to be intelligent.

And you look at another machine, this one, and it's nice and blinky but doesn't seem to be intelligent.

So no AI here.

This has quite a lot of problems, this definition.

The question is, it doesn't help you make artificial intelligence.

It doesn't really actually help you understand what or diagnose artificial intelligence.

It just basically tells you, well, artificial intelligence is made up of two words.

Artificial, we translate that by machines, and intelligence we explain by intelligence.

How nice. Have we gained anything? Almost nothing.

This is not going to really help us.

There are other definitions. One is, and that's also in Wikipedia, just to be fair.

AI is a subfield of computer science that is concerned with automation of intelligent behavior.

This has an advantage that it actually gives us a hint of how we might actually achieve artificial intelligence.

We're not actually going to achieve artificial intelligence by taking legos, plain old legos, and building something.

That's not the approach artificial intelligence has.

But the approach is that we use computers somehow.

We could whittle it in wood or mold it out of wax or soap.

We're not going to do this. We're going to use automation techniques.

But then, of course, there's the big problem. We translate intelligence by intelligence.

What is intelligence?

Nobody really has a good definition of what intelligence is.

It's kind of the we know it when we see it kind of property.

I'm pretty sure this is not intelligent, and I'm also sure that the thermostat, which is why I brought this up, is not intelligent.

But for most of you, I'm going to quantify that completely.

I'm pretty sure that you're intelligent. There's lots of indications for that.

I might be fooled by your outward appearance.

They never have to create their own work.

Yes.

So what I want to do is I want to kind of get you thinking.

We're not going to do the definition of intelligence.

Psychologists, who are really the discipline that are responsible for coming up with the definition of intelligence,

they've basically given up.

Their working definition for intelligence is intelligence is what the intelligence tests, IQ tests measure.

Ha ha ha.

So that probably doesn't help. But you can probably learn something from this.

So definitions we probably have to look somewhere else.

There's a nice definition by Elaine Rich that says,

A study is how we can make the computer do things that humans can still do better at the moment.

That's a nice, accurate description of what AI is doing.

We're trying to make computers do things that humans can do better.

Driving cars, translating from German to Japanese, making, doing maths, learning stuff.

All these kind of things.

This one, this definition also has a huge flaw.

AI is kind of like pathology in medicine.

The Department for the Therapy of Resistant Cases.