We don’t know what human intelligence is, so how can we even consider what artificial intelligence is?

We talk of AI as if it’s something new to the 21^st Century, that’s going to end all humanity, over which we have no control, but which will control us instead. As if it’s a sole all-encompassing actor in our digital age.

But is it really? The majority of people have no idea of what AI is, despite the fact that it’s been around us for many years and that, in fact, it’s something that we can master. We can choose how AI is created, curated and governed, and what it uses as its source of data and information.

An example of AI in action that is around us every day is chatbots. They are, simply put, computer programmes built to have a conversation – either spoken or written - with people. How do they do this? Are these programmes so ‘intelligent’ that they give such human-sounding responses that we can’t tell if we’re talking to a human or not? No. It’s not AI alone that the chatbot relies on. Here’s an explanation.

Bots Require Our Feedback

In 1984, the series The Transformers told the story of two opposing factions of transforming alien robots engaged in a battle with the fate of Earth in the balance. The show was so popular that it was re-released and extended as a TV series and then films in a series, the most recent in 2018.

Why is this relevant to AI? One of the characters in the new series – Bumblebee – loses the power of speech and has to resort to pre-recorded responses. How does Bumblebee select the appropriate response?