An electronic butler that answers your questions using all the resources of the Internet. An artificial infant you raise from birth, teaching it and helping it develop its own unique personality. A security system that learns your attacks and improves itself.
No, not science fiction: these are all applications of artificial intelligence in use today. We may not have a HAL-like computer system today, but AI is being used to enhance a wide variety of products and create new applications, and it is fuelling some of the latest hot Internet startups.
The definition of "artificial intelligence" depends on whom you ask, but businesses have all sorts of uses for smarter computers. "One common definition is that if a computer does something where, if a person did that job, you'd say the person was intelligent, then you can say the computer is intelligent," says Dave Cliff, a former associate professor at the AI labs of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, now technical lead at Hewlett-Packard Labs, in the digital media systems department.
"People are expensive and error-prone and hard to get hold of. In general AI can be used to improve products and make machines do things that otherwise you'd need a human to do," Cliff says.
That could be something as simple as the self-repairing photocopiers and laser-printers of today, that eliminate the need for constant visits by a repairman. In reality, such simple applications aren't usually considered AI. "AI has always been plagued by this problem: as soon as machines have the ability to do something, people think maybe you didn't need to be that intelligent to do it after all," says Cliff.
He uses the example of chess-playing, which was once thought to require intelligence. "Then the Deep Blue team beat Gary Kasparov, and now it's not considered an AI problem," Cliff points out. Likewise, speech recognition is within reach of any reasonably powerful PC, but is not considered a mark of intelligence.
