Despite it feeling to many like a 'future tech' concept, Artificial Intelligence has actually been around prominently since the mid 90's - in fact, John McCarthy coined the term back in 1955, defining it as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines".
I wanted to explore precisely where this tech is being used now on a large scale, if it's evolved successfully from its initial goal of making intelligent machines and what you and I as consumers need to know about.
For each episode of the series, I try to go out on the field and talk to everyday citizens about their most pressing questions to do with the topic we're covering. In this case, a significant amount of people wanted to know if machines could behave ethically, think independently and critically, be used ethically.
There's also a lot of commentary online reflecting concerns about advances in AI and robotics potentially displacing real jobs - some research even suggests AI & robotics might put 47% of U.S. employment (60 mn+ jobs) at risk of being replaced in the next decade. Personally, I'm not entirely convinced about this potential displacement of labour, but that's another matter.
But AI has a mine of positive, constructive applications... interestingly, we may not be aware of some of the services that actually operate silently as a sub-system of AI itself - were you aware for instance that it's used by doctors to work out which patients are at higher risks of certain diseases when taking certain medications?
In this episode, I've raised all these points and more with my two incredible experts - AI architect and Author of "In Our Own Image" George Zarkadakis and AI pioneer and founder of Cleverbot, Rollo Carpenter. Have a watch.