In the Beginning

What is artificial intelligence? It is a question that everybody seems to be asking. I would like to answer this in the most indirect fashion ever. Let's not think about what is artificial intelligence. But, let's refocus that to "what does artificial intelligence means to me"?

Let's look at something very similar. Something that has become part of our daily lives, something that artificial intelligence will eventually be. Let's look at the internet. I was lucky to be at the beginning of the internet when it became more widely known to the public and became that much more useful. If you ask me then what was the Internet then and then you asked me now what is the Internet, I would have given two very different answers. Largely because I am a technical guy and I basically understand the various components and how the internet works. But what the internet is now, means very different. What the internet means to me. I mean that in a way that we will think of AI in the future in the same way that we are thinking about internet now. If you look at the internet now, we don't really see the internet. What we see is the effects and the content and the result of the internet. In fact, we don't really care what the internet is. What we do care is what the internet means to us and what it brings to us. And whenever the Internet is down.

I'll answer that right now. The internet is communication. The internet makes what was far away, become near. Everything else is on top of that. Yes, there are internet merchants and stores and marketplace but what do those places mean? They are the result of the internet bridging communications, and bringing people closer together. The warehouses, the logistics delivery vans and so on support what the internet created. E-commerce sites cannot exist without the internet and what the internet does is bringing the customer to the seller. It bridges that gap. The same applies to person-to-person communications like voice call and text messaging. The same applies to traveling from place to place whether is it across town or across the globe. We don't have to go to the street to call a taxi or go to a travel agent to buy plane tickets (if we don't want to). And so on and so forth.

Artificial Intelligence will become that way. We will not think about AI but what AI does for us. What functions or services AI delivers to us. Sure, there will be technical people like me who will see AI for all it's technical parts. But most likely you won't. So don't worry too much about what Artificial Intelligence is. Worry what about it will do for us and what it will do to us. Think about how the services that AI delivers impact our lives. We should focus on that to ensure our decisions are part of that. 

And killer robots. Worry about AI in robots with guns.