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Introduction

Artificial Intelligence is something we’ve envisioned for decades- but usually this has been in the fictional world. It’s defined as the “capability of a machine to imitate human behavior”(Merriam-Webster) and it’s a concept that has both intrigued and worried us. We’ve seen countless depictions of a society overrun by various sorts of artificially intelligent machines, but we are just now hearing these ideas in the realistic sense. As the subject becomes more and more tangible, there are many exciting possibilities arising, but also an equal amount of valid concern for how advanced this technology could become.

Current Use

The majority of us have smart phones that we can talk to and receive responses from, like Siri. And systems like Siri are forms of artificial intelligence because they can attempt conversational exchanges and answer questions or make comments. Some people even own gaming systems that will utilize facial and auditory recognition to enhance the experience, like the Xbox Kinect. With the Kinect, the machine will listen for different voices and search for different faces in order to establish who is using the system, this is quite a personalized and advanced form of artificial intelligence. We have grown leaps and bounds since the days of robot chatrooms where computers could respond to just a few basic questions, but we have yet to reach the point where robots can actually perceive “the overall tone of the conversation, wider context, metaphors, or emotional overtones” (Dujmovic, 2014). Though, currently, we are more advanced in the field of artificial intelligence, it is far from what it can and may soon be. “AI still has many limitations, with AI scientists still not able to ‘solve the problem of common sense’”(Gross, 2014) and “most of the consumer-level artificial intelligence applications we’re interacting with today can barely be classified as such” (Dujmovic, 2014). We are only at the frontier of what will possibly by a pivotal change in the way we live and the way the world works.