AI and Its Impacts: A Brief Introduction | BlueDot Impact

Welcome from AI Safety Fundamentals! We've consolidated our course sites in the BlueDot Impact platform to provide a more consistent and higher-quality experience. In this course, we are concerned with Artificial Intelligence – but what is it? This is a difficult question, because of the AI effect: When something is hard for us – for example, playing chess well – we believe it must require "true intelligence". But once we understand the problem well enough to make a computer solve it, it stops being "AI" and becomes "just computation". For this reason, we adopt a very broad view where AI is any method that allows machines to solve problems. To understand existing AI techniques, we can consider existing tools and inventions they enabled: Neural networks and large language models (LLMs) are the latest additions to the AI toolkit. However, it is likely that we will come up with further techniques in the future. It is important to keep in mind that new techniques do not replace all previou

Welcome from AI Safety Fundamentals! We've consolidated our course sites in the BlueDot Impact platform to provide a more consistent and higher-quality experience. In this course, we are concerned with Artificial Intelligence – but what is it? This is a difficult question, because of the AI effect: When something is hard for us – for example, playing chess well – we believe it must require "true intelligence". But once we understand the problem well enough to make a computer solve it, it stops being "AI" and becomes "just computation". For this reason, we adopt a very broad view where AI is an