Artificial Intelligence — Will It Benefit Us or Kill Us?

Just what is artificial intelligence, and is it really useful?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a hot topic these days. From all of the articles on the subject it would seem that experts are split on whether advances in AI will benefit us or kill us. What exactly is “artificial intelligence” and why such division on its benefits?

It may be surprising to some that AI has been around more than 50 years. In 2007, John McCarthy from the Computer Science Department of Stanford University wrote an article titled, “What Is Artificial Intelligence?” In his article, Mr. McCarthy attempts to answer questions about AI by offering opinions on various questions posed by the average person. The article includes a reference to the “Turing test”. In Alan Turing’s 1950 article Computing Machinery and Intelligence [Tur50] on the subject of considering a machine to be intelligent, he argued that if the machine could successfully pretend to be human to a knowledgeable observer then it should be considered intelligent. The observer could…