Quite some time ago, when I was a graduate student studying artificial
intelligence, one definition for artificial intelligence (AI), offered
in a textbook, was "the study of how to make computers do things which,
at the moment, people do better." The authors went on to admit the
ephemeral nature of the answer because of its reference to a current
state. While suggesting that their definition avoided the philosophical
issue around the words "artificial" and "intelligence," further admitted
that AI thus bore a similarity to philosophy in that it has always been
the study of those branches of knowledge too poorly understood to be
disciplines in their own right, and that, perhaps, as fields such as
mathematics and physics had become more advanced and broken off from
philosophy, so too would AI, reducing itself to the empty set.