How Machines Think
What Is AI, Really?
6 min+50 XPStep 1/8
AI or not AI?
Quick game — which of these are AI?
- A calculator
- Your For You page
- A light switch
- Face unlock
- A vending machine
Answers: calculator — no (fixed math rules). Feed — yes (learned your patterns). Light switch — no. Face unlock — yes (learned to recognize faces). Vending machine — no (rules only).
The dividing line isn't 'computer does smart thing' — it's whether the behavior was learned from examples or hard-coded as rules.
insight
A simple test for 'is it AI?': could it do its job without ever seeing an example? If it needed to learn from data — it's AI. If a programmer wrote every rule — it's just software.