St. Petersburg Conference on World Affairs expands with first sold-out mini-conference on AI [Audio]

Click the arrow above to listen to the full conversation between computer scientist Nicolas Sabouret and St. Pete Catalyst publisher Joe Hamilton in the Catalyst studio. The term "artificial intelligence" has been so tainted by science fiction that for most it carries images of dystopian futures, homicidal robots and epic Steven Spielberg movies. But according to AI expert Nicolas Sabouret, the first thing people should know when about artificial intelligence when putting it in layman's terms, is that artificial intelligence is not really about intelligence at all. "What machines do is computation, something they do very well," Sabouret said in advance of his artificial intelligence presentation for the St. Petersburg Conference on World Affairs Nov. 6. "Artificial intelligence is the science that makes machines do things by computation that human beings do with their intelligence. Sabouret used chess as an example in explaining how artificial intelligence works through computation. There are more combinations of games in chess than the number of atoms in the entire universe, he said. With so many possibilities, machines are far better able to discover new paths or types of games than human beings could think of. "Still it doesn't mean the machine has created something new.