Artificial Intelligence

An Explosion of Technology:
What is it?
The term artificial intelligence is defined as "the study and design of intelligent agents", but what does this even mean and what qualifies a computer or electronic system to be an “intelligent agent” (“Artificial Intelligence” par. 1)? Over the past few decades movies such as Terminator and iRobot have been released depicting artificially intelligent beings that have achieved higher capabilities of understanding, sometimes even surpassing human intelligence. The real question is how realistic are these movies? Products such as SIRI and the autonomous Google Cars may give the world a glimpse into the future of A.I. (Allen par. 5-7). With the exponential increase in computer technology such as the innovative

“It had multiply jointed realistic wings, could move its head around and mimic the swallowing neck movements of a duck, “eat” grain, splash water, etc.” (Malcolm par. 9-10). This would be, what people of the 18th century, described as artificial intelligence due to the fact that it could mirror the actions of an intelligent organism. However, in the modern era, this would only pass for a high school science fair project. The definition of A.I. has progressed exponentially since 1738 once again making headlines in 1996 with the emergence of the IBM computer named Deep Blue. For the first time ever, a computer was able to defeat a champion chess player (“Deep Blue” par.

“The cars have required intervention by a human co-pilot only about once every 1,000 miles” (Allen par. 5-7). This is not only a generational break through but shows the capabilities of what autonomous machines running off of artificial intelligence may achieve. However, Google will not stop there, it has also stated that “the goal is to reduce this rate (referring to the human intervention) to once every 1,000,000 miles” (Allen par. 5). To put this statistic in perspective, on average, the lengthiest car life has been reported, by Google, to be the Honda Civic. 1.6 percent of the time the Honda Civic can last over 200,000 miles (“How Many”). By making the one million mile claim, Google is essentially saying that they believe that in the near future it would be possible to have A.I. run the lifespan of eight Honda Civics without an incident. Although these autonomous machines may not be on the market for some time, it is in the foreseeable future that A.I. controls our day to day