Eye on AI: The Other Kinds of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is seemingly everywhere these days, from self-driving cars and virtual assistants to medical innovations. References to AI are so pervasive, it also seems to have different names. Depending on the project at hand, you might hear talk of machine learning, deep learning or cognitive computing, all of which produce a kind of "thinking machine." But while those terms sometimes get used interchangeably, they're not exactly the same thing. AI, of course, is the most commonly used term, because it is the umbrella that sits over the others and also because it has long been alive in the cultural imagination, for both good and ill, from the beneficent Data in "Star Trek: The Next Generation," to the malevolent Agent Smith in "The Matrix," and many other manifestations in between.