Simply put, “artificial intelligence” is people trying to make things do things that we’d call smart if done by people.
So what’s the big deal about that?
Well, as it turns out, a lot of people get quite wound up with the definition of “artificial intelligence.” Sometimes this is because they’re invested in a prescientific notion that machines can’t be intelligent and want to define it in a way that writes the field off before it gets started, or it’s because they’re invested in an unscientific degree into their particular theory of intelligence and want to define it in a way that constrains the field to look at only the things they care about, or because they’re actually not scientific at all and want to proscribe the field to work on the practical problems of particular interest to them.
No, I’m not bitter about having to wade through a dozen bad definitions of artificial intelligence as part of a survey. Why do you ask?
