Smart Machines and Smarter Policy: Foreign Investment Regulation, National Security, and Technology Transfer in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, 51 J. Marshall L. Rev. 279 (2018)
Justin Shields · UIC Law Open Access Repository (University of Illinois at Chicago) · 2018
A. AI Systems and their ApplicationsAI has a wide variety of industrial and defense applications that have led to strategic imperatives to acquire this technology.However, it is difficult to understand what is exactly meant by the term "artificial intelligence" because there is currently no widely accepted definition for it.5 Most definitions of AI focus on replicating human characteristics like consciousness, self-awareness, language use, and the abilities to learn, adapt and reason within a computer system or an algorithm.6 An AI system can consist of both hardware components, like a drone or robot, and software components, like a program running on networked computers.7 The most widely-used approaches to defining AI focus on the achievement of goals through computational processes.8 An ideal AI system is able to synthesize large amounts of data, recognize complex patterns within those data sets, draw conclusions based on those patterns, and then make predictions or take action based on those conclusions.Categorizing AI technologies can be as difficult as defining them, as many companies often mix and match different technologies according to their needs.However, AI systems are generally categorized by functionality or by business application.9 Accordingly, AI systems for industrial applications commonly break down into five categories: robotics & autonomous vehicles, computer vision, language, virtual agents, and machine learning.10 Virtual agents, which are computer programs that can converse with humans like Amazon's "Alexa" or Apple's "Siri," can play a song for you, order your dinner, or give you an answer to a hotly contested trivia question with a simple voice command.Self-driving cars are another high profile industrial application of AI, with driverless fleets from Tesla, Uber, Google's Waymo, and Intel's Mobileye already in the testing phase.Despite the excitement surrounding these consumer applications of AI, the bulk of investment in the technology is going 5.