Sci-fi and science can’t seem to agree on the way we should think about artificial intelligence. Sci-fi wants to portray artificial intelligence agents as thinking machines, while businesses today use artificial intelligence for more mundane tasks like filling out forms with robotic process automation or driving your car. When interacting with these artificial intelligence interfaces at our current level of AI technology, our human inclination is to treat them like vending machines, rather than to treat them like a person. Why? Because thinking of AI like a person (anthropomorphizing) leads to immediate disappointment. Today’s AI is very narrow, and so straying across the invisible line between what these systems can and can’t do leads to generic responses like “I don’t understand that” or “I can’t do that yet”. Although the technology is extremely cool, it just doesn’t think in the way that you or I think of as thinking.
Let’s look at how that “thinking” process works, and examine how there are different kinds of thinking going on inside AI systems.