Ask almost anyone to define artificial intelligence, and you’ll likely get an answer that sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie. A few real-life examples might come up, with self-driving cars, IBM’s Watson winning “Jeopardy!,” and so on. But, for many, AI still evokes a sense of futuristic fantasy.
Defining AI is hard. A common (if vaguely circular) definition is the replication of human thought processes—language, learning, decision-making, and so on—by computers. In part because it’s hard to define AI in general, it’s also hard to say what particular technologies are or aren’t AI. Optical character recognition seemed like AI until it made its way into almost every ATM in order to read deposited checks (and it doesn’t help that “optical character recognition” isn’t quite as awe-inspiring as “a computer that can read”).
