Artificial Intelligence - Powerful But Not Almighty

Artificial intelligence is powerful but not almighty. The worry that AI could one day put us all out of jobs and rule the world is a tantalising, but highly improbable, prospect.

- Charlie Rose Lee

Like it or not, machines with brains have infiltrated our lives. They’re in our computers, mobile phones, televisions, home appliances and even in our toothbrushes (Oral-B’s Genius X reportedly coaches you to clean your mouth better). Artificial intelligence (AI) has been deployed across industries, including healthcare and finance; it’s making music, art and poetry; it’s telling you what to watch on Netflix, what to eat for dinner and basically what to do with your time. It’s getting smarter, bolder and stronger, but not in the way popular culture makes it out to be: a conscious robot with superhuman abilities.

In spite of all the hype surrounding AI, the technology is often misunderstood and unsurprisingly so. The phrase ‘artificial intelligence’ has been used and misused in tech, and there’s little meaning attached to the words today. Still, it’s helpful to dispel the mystique around AI in the hopes of putting it in its place as, quite simply, a technology that optimises human-given goals.

Oxford English Dictionary defines AI as ‘the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages’.