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For years, “artificial intelligence” meant processing information like the human brain. Not any more.
Isaac Asimov’s book, “I, Robot,” began as a series of short stories published in the 1940s. His robots, with their positronic brains, thought more or less like humans. Dr. Susan Calvin was a main character in the stories. She was a robopsychologist.
Decades later, artificial intelligence, or “AI,” has become a marketing term, and it means nothing more than “a cool way to process information using our nifty computer program.” Marketing specialists co-opted the term when they needed a way to describe two different things: machine learning, and the processing of big data.
Big data created a specific new problem. We had plenty of information about what people were purchasing, and plenty of information about the traits of the purchasers, but we didn’t have a way to put all of that information together in meaningful ways. Spreadsheets didn’t help, because they were too big to be read by one person. Databases didn’t help, because the tables that held the data were similarly too big. The solution, from a programmer’s perspective, was obvious: write software to parse and combine all of that information about the purchasers and what they purchased, and see if any useful connections jump out.