Global Economic Impacts Associated with Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (“AI”), a term first coined in 1956, is a branch of computer science that aims to create intelligent machines that work and react like humans.2 At the beginning of the study of AI, British mathematician Alan Turing proposed the true indication of computer intelligence to be when a question‐asker could not distinguish between answers from a human and those from a computer.3 In contrast, today, 60 years later, AI is characterized by a number of applications, including computers playing games against humans and understanding human languages, virtual personal assistants, and robotics which involve computers seeing, hearing, and reacting to sensory stimuli.4 Looking forward to the next decade, technologists have offered a wide array of predictions for AI, ranging from AI being used as a tool to aid relatively simple processes (which some refer to as weak AI) to robots with human‐like mental capabilities (which is sometimes referred to as strong AI).5 According to AI expert Sir Nigel Shadbolt: “What we really have in AI is a whole spectrum of abilities, from programs that are smart but they are not smart like us, to programs that are super clever in specific areas.”6