Bots and robbers What is AI, and will it make us all redundant?

What is artificial intelligence?

- Alex Hern and Dan Milmo

The term was coined in 1955 by a team including Harvard computer scientist Marvin Minsky. With no strict definition of the phrase, almost anything more complex than a calculator has been called artificial intelligence by someone.

But in the current debate, AI has come to mean something else. It boils down to this: most old-school computers do what they are told, following instructions given to them in the form of code. For them to solve more complex tasks, scientists are trying to train them how to learn in a way that imitates human behaviour.

Computers cannot be taught to think for themselves, but can be taught to analyse information and draw inferences from patterns in datasets. The more you give them - computer systems can now cope with vast amounts of information - the better they should get at it.

The most successful versions of machine learning in recent years have used a system known as a neural network, which is modelled at a very simple level on how we think a brain works.

Where might I start to encounter more chatbots or Al content?