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Welcome to Six Minute English, where we bring you an intelligent topic and six related items of vocabulary.
I'm Neil.
And I'm Tim.
And today we are talking about AI or artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is the ability of machines to copy human intelligent behavior.
For example, an intelligent machine can learn from its own mistakes and make decisions based on what's happened in the past.
There's a lot of talk about AI these days, Neil, but it's still just science fiction, isn't it?
That's not true.
AI is everywhere.
Machine thinking is in our homes, offices, schools, and hospitals.
Computer algorithms are helping us drive our cars.
They're diagnosing what's wrong with us in hospitals.
They're marking student essays.
They're telling us what to read on our smartphones.
Well, that really does sound like science fiction.
But it's happening already, you say, Neil.
It's definitely happening, Tim.
And an algorithm, by the way, is a set of steps, a computer follows in order to solve a problem.