AI combines three disciplines—math, computer science, and cognitive science—to mimic human behavior through various technologies. All of the AI in place today is task-specific, or narrow AI. This is an important distinction as many think of AI as the general ability to reason, think, and perceive. This is known as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) which, at this point, is not technically possible.
This technology is rapidly evolving, and neither the scientific community nor industry agree on a common definition.
Some common definitions of AI include:
- A branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers.
- Advanced statistical and analytical methods such as machine learning and artificial neural networks, especially deep learning.
- A computer system able to perform specific tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and language translation.
AI capabilities are rapidly evolving, and neither the scientific community nor industry agree on a common definition of these technologies. In this guide, we will use the definition of AI from the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019, which is also referenced in the Executive Order on Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence.
The term “artificial intelligence” includes the following:
- Any artificial system that performs tasks under varying and unpredictable circumstances without significant human oversight, or that can learn from experience and improve performance when exposed to data sets.
- An artificial system developed in computer software, physical hardware, or other context that solves tasks requiring human-like perception, cognition, planning, learning, communication, or physical action.
- An artificial system designed to think or act like a human, including cognitive architectures and neural networks.
- A set of techniques, including machine learning, that is designed to approximate a cognitive task.
- An artificial system designed to act rationally, including an intelligent software agent or embodied robot that achieves goals using perception, planning, reasoning, learning, communicating, decision making, and acting.
It is important to keep in mind that the definition of AI is still evolving and that achievements in the field today have been in task-specific AI or “narrow AI”, as opposed to what is commonly called artificial general intelligence that can learn a wide range of tasks—like humans.
