On the Nature of Artificial
Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) has grown out of modern
computing combined with a plethora of data to interpret and engineering problems to solve. In some sense,
it returns to the earlier methods of analyzing data and
trying to build predictive models based on empirical
data in a “natural” way. In this sense, AI techniques are
typically more data-based than dynamics-based. This
use of data can make fast, robust, and skillful forecasts
possible in domains that might be intractable by a
dynamics-based approach. As Einstein once remarked,
“So far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they
are not certain. And so far as they are certain, they do
not refer to reality” (Einstein 1922).