Artificial Intelligence and Employment: Issues and Challenges

2. Artificial Intelligence

In a simple sense, artificial intelligence is the process by which machines, particularly computers, imitate human intelligence processes. OECD (2006) and UNCTAD (2017) defines artificial intelligence as “the ability of machines and systems to acquire and apply knowledge and to carry out intelligent behaviour”. Under artificial intelligence, machines are designed to learn from experience, think, work, make decisions, and perform tasks like humans.

The concept of innovation in technology is as old as the invention of technology itself. As far as the idea of artificial intelligence goes, it came into existence even before the invention of computers. Ancient thinkers developed this idea of mechanizing non-human machines with human thinking (Gerber & Hiernaux, 2022). Their idea got a boost with the invention of programable digital computers in the 1940s. The invention of computers encouraged scientists to visualize and materialize the development of the electronic brain, which today is known as artificial intelligence (Copeland, 1993). This idea of including human intelligence in machines in the form of artificial intelligence can be traced back to the 1940s, when Warren Ms. Culloch and Walter Pits proposed a model of artificial neurons. This was followed by demonstration of a rule called Hebbian Learning. Hebbian learning is Donald Hebb's rule for changing the strength of connections between neurons. In 1950, Alan Turing, a mathematician by profession, published an article titled ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” in which he proposed a test to measure machines ability to replicate human behaviour (Turing, 1950). During the same decade, Johan McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence (Kim, 2022).