AI in Plain English

Artificial intelligence is the science of making computers do things that normally need human thinking. Modern AI mostly learns patterns from huge numbers of examples instead of following hand-written rules. Chatbots predict likely next words, so they can sound sure and still be wrong. AI can be biased, can be misused for scams and deepfakes, and needs human checking. The EU and UK are taking different routes to regulating AI. Used wisely, AI is a powerful helper, not a replacement for your own judgement. The Dream of Thinking Machines People imagined clever machines for centuries. But the real story of artificial intelligence, or AI, begins in the middle of the twentieth century, when the first electronic computers made the dream seem possible. Can machines think? In 1950 the British mathematician Alan Turing published a paper called “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”. It opened with a simple question: can machines think? Turing thought the words “machine” and “think” were too vague to…