Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a rapidly advancing technology, made possible by the Internet, that may soon have significant impacts on our everyday lives.

Current Uses of AI:

Although artificial intelligence evokes thoughts of science fiction, artificial intelligence already has many uses today, for example:

• Email filtering: Email services use artificial intelligence to filter incoming emails. Users can train their spam filters by marking emails as “spam”.
• Personalization: Online services use artificial intelligence to personalize your experience. Services, like Amazon or Netflix, “learn” from your previous purchases and the purchases of other users in order to recommend relevant content for you.
• Fraud detection: Banks use artificial intelligence to determine if there is strange activity on your account. Unexpected activity, such as foreign transactions, could be flagged by the algorithm.
• Speech recognition: Applications use artificial intelligence to optimize speech recognition functions. Examples include intelligent personal assistants, e.g. Amazon’s “Alexa” or Apple’s “Siri”.

Artificial intelligence is further defined as “narrow AI” or “general AI”. Narrow AI, which we interact with today, is designed to perform specific tasks within a domain (e.g. language translation). General AI is hypothetical and not domain specific, but can learn and perform tasks anywhere.