what is artificial intelligence ai 
artificial intelligence ai technology allows computers and machines to simulate human intelligence and problem solving tasks the ideal characteristic of artificial intelligence is its ability to rationalize and take action to achieve a specific goal ai research began in the 1950s and was used in the 1960s by the united states department of defense when it trained computers to mimic human reasoning 1a subset of artificial intelligence is machine learning ml a concept that computer programs can automatically learn from and adapt to new data without human assistance 