Campus Queries: What does artificial intelligence do and how does it work? - Daily Bruin

Campus Queries is a series in which Daily Bruin readers and staff present science-related questions for UCLA professors and experts to answer. Q: What is artificial intelligence? A: Artificial intelligence is emulating a task on a computer that's easy for a human, said Judea Pearl, a researcher and UCLA computer science professor. Home assistants like Amazon's Alexa talk to their users the way people talk to each other, and many media portrayals of AI, like Skynet from the "Terminator" franchise, depict them as out to dominate humanity. Despite the range of intelligence displayed by AI in the real world and fiction, the larger question of what makes a computer truly intelligent remains.