Lesson 1: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

Learning objectives

In this lesson, you will learn about:

• The Evolution of AI

The term Artificial Intelligence (AI) was coined in 1955 by an American computer scientist named John McCarthy, whose father was from County Kerry. The ambition of AI scientists was to enable machines to do everything that humans can do, but better.

AI means that a computer program or machine can think, learn, and solve problems! With experience, the computer’s algorithm gets better and better and starts to think abstractly and generate new ideas.

An important area of AI is Machine Learning (ML), which provides a way for a system (often referred to as a model) to infer new knowledge about data. With ML, computers learn things without being programmed or instructed. Instead of writing code, engineers and scientists feed information to a generic algorithm in the form of data. The more data that is put in, the more intelligent the machine becomes.

AI has been around for over 50 years and is increasingly popular. How do you think AI will evolve over the next 50 years?