Between Hollywood and your dusty stack of sci-fi novels, you’ve been given many outlandish representations of the AI of the future. But AI is already here. It’s all around us — just in humbler forms.

Intelligent behavior in an autonomous agent — THIS is AI. It’s describing the brain, not the body, of intelligent machines (AI ≠ robots). The AI of today can do specific tasks (driving a car, booking meetings, picking your next Netflix binge). AI research is leading toward something more advanced: artificial general intelligence, or AGI. This AI — when a machine can do things in a way that is indistinguishable from human behavior — is what we’re all waiting for.