questions about the benefits and potential costs of some of the scientific and technological advances. However, public debate is often hindered by a basic lack of understanding of fundamental issues such as risk or scientific fact. After all, some people consider the television show the X-Files to be a quasi-documentary. Nevertheless, the advanced development of AI will bring more benefits to society than anything else, and we should embrace the possibilities of its integration into our society. In order to form an educated opinion, one must understand exactly what AI is. AI is a term that in its broadest sense would indicate the ability of computer to perform the same kinds of functions that characterize human thought, like decision making. With the growth of modern science and technology, the search for AI has taken two major directions: psychological and physiological research into the nature of human thought, and the technological development of increasingly sophisticated computing systems (Rheingold 10).In sophisticated computing systems, the term AI has been applied to computer systems and programs capable of performing tasks more complex than straightforward programming, although they are still much removed from the realm of actual thought. The most important fields of research in this area are information processing, pattern recognition, game-playing computers, and applied fields such as medical diagnosis (McCarthy). Current research in information processing deals with programs that enable a computer to understand written or spoken information and to produce summaries, answer specific questions, or redistribute information to the users interested in specific areas of this information. Essential to such programs is the ability of the system to generate grammatically correct sentences and to establish links between words, ideas, and to recognize associations with other ideas.As in grammar programs in medicine, which analyze the...
