When I say AI I mean....

I'm a bit fed up with the (lack of a) "definition of AI".

I have a conceit that AI is the practical child of Artificial Intelligence. My attitude is that we'll leave the academics to get on with modelling the workings of the mind and pick up the useful tools and approaches that drop off that program, and use them to solve real business problems. But this leaves me with a problem.

Years ago I was part of the Intelligent Agent community in academia. Every time people asked "but what is an Agent" there were howls of anguish from us all because we knew that 3 hours were about to be wasted with arguments that sat angels on pins and then knocked them off again.

I'm pretty happy with the wide and vague definitions of Agents and Artificial Intelligence that are in general use because of this challenge. Philosophy is hard after all. And having a vague definition of Artificial Intelligence doesn't impede progress. Folks like Tenenbaum & Re aren't going to be worried that what they are doing might be thought of as cognition, intelligence or behavior. These are just terms and by breaking open the mechanics of the mind the terms are going to get shredded and recast in any case (possibly all terms, all at once).

I want to use the technology to solve problems - but using it is different and trickier than implementing a classic IT system. IT routes information about, stores it and pools it for people to use. AI does something different - it's about transforming the information into knowledge and action. AI isn't an if-then-else statement, or even a collection of if-then-else statements (even Expert-Systems had more too them than this), and it's also not a magical box that can rise from the basement, fly round the room and tell us the future.

So how about "A practical definition of AI is that it is software technology that transforms information from its environment into knowledge of the state of objects in the system that it is part of. AI can use this knowledge, the knowledge of its own state and the knowledge of other objects state in the system, to either make decisions to direct the system, or to offer options & knowledge to human users."