What is AI?
To understand what is coming our way, we first need to go deeper into the meaning of that mysterious concept of AI, Artificial Intelligence. In short: it is a computer program that does the things that you do. That program does that less well, as well or better than you do. And it does this in one specific area, in a number of areas or over a very wide area. The better the program works, the more "intelligent" we think it is.

The shortest possible definition is therefore: AI is software. It is our thinking power that we have brought out of ourselves - in the form of code - and that we put to work for certain purposes.
Take Excel. A miracle of computing power. We can also do what Excel does, but we need extra time for that. Excel is AI in one specific area and it does that faster and better (because error-free) than we do. In English-language literature this is called an ANI, an Artificial Narrow Intelligence.
We are already surrounded by countless expressions of artificial intelligence (aka ANI), but we don't call it that. With the term artificial intelligence we usually refer to programs that can read, see, reason and think. In short, those who can do what we can do broadly and who are no less inferior to that. In theory this is called an AGI, an Artificial General Intelligence. The more ANIs there are, the smaller the jump to an AGI becomes. Google's self-driving car is such a combination of ANIs. Many smart systems that together form a new system. But they remain ANIs. More is needed for the jump to an AGI.

This leaves us at simplifying the field and bringing it to operations. With simple machine learning for everybody.


Only the we from ask of people to buy into the new and evolving field of AI.