About Artificial Intelligence

A recent discipline

Attended by many brilliant minds of the era, the 1956 Dartmouth workshop on Artificial Intelligence is widely considered the event that kicked off AI as a research discipline.

The original ambition of AI

“AI is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.” (John McCarthy)

“Every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.” (Dartmouth Workshop, 1956)

“AI is the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men.” (Marvin Minsky)

A technical definition of AI

“AI refers to systems that display intelligent behavior by analysing their environment and taking actions - with some degree of autonomy - to achieve specific goals.” (European Commission, 2018)

AI systems can be either:

• Purely software-based (e.g. voice assistants, search engines, face recognition systems).

• Embedded in hardware devices (e.g. robots, autonomous cars, drones).

Main areas of research

• Problem solving (e.g. search algorithms, constraint solving).

• Reasoning and decision making (e.g. logic, knowledge representation).

• Machine Learning (e.g. systems that improve with experience).

• Real-world interactions (e.g. computer vision, natural language understanding, robotics).

AI as a moving target

As soon as AI successfully solves a problem, the problem is no longer considered a part of AI.

“AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.” (Larry Tesler)

The tumultuous history of AI

A highly interdisciplinary field

AI as a social science

AI has many social and societal implications:

• Job market transformation.

• Human/machine interactions.

• Trust and acceptability.

• Legal aspects and regulation.

• Fairness.

• Ethical use.

• Privacy and usage of personal data.

• …

The different flavours of AI

• Substitutive intelligence: replacement of men by machines on specific tasks.

• Augmented intelligence: human-centered AI for performance augmentation or autonomy enhancement.

• Hybrid intelligence: human-machine collaboration on complex tasks.

A broader definition of AI

“AI is an interdisciplinary field aiming at understanding and imitating the mechanisms of cognition and reasoning, in order to assist or substitute humans in their activities.” (Commission d’enrichissement de la langue française, 2018)