does our community perceive artificial intelligence?

For this first study within the BEL'S AI Initiative community, we wanted to know how members perceive artificial intelligence. To do so, we gave each member the opportunity to answer three questions, the answers of which we will summarize in this post.

The first question was whether artificial intelligence is a science or a technology?

Indeed, science is the study of the phenomena that surround us by basing the analysis on observation, experimentation and measurement. The objective of science is to produce knowledge about the unknown in order to understand our environment. As for technology, it is a set of knowledge and techniques that applied in an orderly fashion allow us to generate useful and practical solutions to meet human needs. Thus, artificial intelligence is both a science and a technology as the majority of the community members (64.6%) think. Although very often the technology side of artificial intelligence is more emphasized than the science side as the survey shows, it is important to underline that intelligence is first of all a science (multidisciplinary) that has rules, theories, principles that allow us to set up technologies. Ignoring this scientific side is a mistake that could be detrimental to those who want to use AI for a sustainable solution that meets a human need in an ethical way.

The majority of the responses emphasized AI as a technology for automating tasks. However, the boxed definition proposed by one participant caught our attention. Although witty and perhaps amusing, the link made between humans and machines clearly highlights the intuition behind artificial intelligence. Indeed, Artificial Intelligence is a multidisciplinary science that allows machines to endow the reasoning capacities of the human brain through a learning environment.