"Just a reminder that computers cannot “think.” Electronic circuitry allows two states: on or off. Put another way, True or False, Yes or No. For example, I can program a computer to say, “What is your first name?” Next, I can say, “IF the First_Name = ‘Bill’ Then Ask ‘Do you like to visit islands?'” If the answer to that is Yes, I can write a step to ask, “Are these islands frequented by billionaires and powerful politicians?”…and so on until the computer has used “artificial intelligence” to conclude its talking to Bill Gates or Bill Clinton. A.I. just expands this concept to billions of little such questions and branches of decision trees. So-called artificial intelligence has existed for decades. It’s become all the rage nowadays because we have the storage capacity, memory, and processing power to navigate these trees in seconds, along with endless mountains of data from the web for input. The pros, cons, and dangers of A.I. are based on this data put into the systems and the humans programming them."
