(1) See
Adobe Illustrator.
(2) (
Artificial
Intelligence) Devices and applications that exhibit human intelligence and behavior. AI includes android-like robots, self-driving cars, medical diagnosis, software programming and the generation of text, images and videos. Virtually every industry from finance to agriculture is exploring or using AI to improve operations and decision making. See
AI in a nutshell,
chatbot and
AI glossary.
The Entire Field or One Application
The term AI may refer to the entire field of artificial intelligence or to one specific application of AI. Often, the term AI means a complete system; for example, "there is an AI to handle this." See
AI agent and
AI use cases.
Past and Present Buzzword
Although AI is a very hot topic today, the acid test of AI was actually defined in the 1940s by English scientist, Alan Turing, who said, "a machine has artificial intelligence when there is no discernible difference between the conversation generated by the machine and that of an intelligent person" (see
Turing test). There have been several formal meetings since the 1950s to discuss the subject (see
AI conferences), and an ongoing competition for the best chatbot began in 1991 (see
Loebner Prize).
Will AI Eliminate Jobs?
Increasingly, people are concerned that AI will eliminate too many jobs. This is not an unfounded worry. Estimates of jobs lost in the future range from 300 million to one billion worldwide. See
AI anxiety.
In 2023, a PCMag article speculated that these jobs could disappear sooner than later due to AI: accountants, content moderators, legal assistants, proofreaders, financial traders, speech-to-text transcribers, graphic designers, customer service reps, writers and soldiers. Of course, soldiers replaced by robots might be the best outcome, providing robots battle robots.
An Ironic Twist in Terminology
In the computer field, the term "intelligence" means processing capability. That means your microwave oven is intelligent, but the chatbot that creates an original video from your description is only "artificially" intelligent. See
AI in a nutshell and
AI glossary.
The Cerebras AI Computer
Founder and chief architect of Cerebras Systems, Sean Lie is holding the wafer that is the heart of the Cerebras computer. Designed for AI processing, it contains 2.6 trillion transistors (see
Cerebras AI computer).
(Image courtesy of Cerebras Systems.)