Artificial Intelligence for the Curious and Confused: An Intro for Non-Techies

The Non-Techie’s Guide to Understanding That Thing Everyone’s Talking About

Arc Sosangyo
5 min readNov 13, 2024
Photo by Gerard Siderius on Unsplash

AI — Artificial Intelligence, or, as I like to think of it, the tech equivalent of that friend who always remembers your coffee order, your birthday, and the fact that you hate spoilers. But unlike your friend who might occasionally forget all that and send you a spoiler anyway, AI doesn’t forget. It learns, adapts, and keeps improving with every little detail it’s fed. Let’s explore what this really means, in non-techie terms, and find out if this whole AI thing is just a trendy buzzword or something we should actually pay attention to.

So, what is AI, anyway?

At its core, AI is a kind of brainpower that we humans have taught machines. But instead of a real brain, it’s a computer program built to think and work like a human — only way faster and without the need for caffeine. Imagine you’re teaching a machine to spot patterns, answer questions, and solve problems, sort of like a pet you’re training to do tricks. The more tricks (or “tasks”) you teach it, the smarter it gets. Over time, it becomes a very reliable assistant that’s shockingly good at predicting what you’ll want next or responding to what you need, almost before you even…

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Arc Sosangyo
Arc Sosangyo

Written by Arc Sosangyo

Arc is an iOS Dev and app publisher, a former IT manager who transitioned to iOS engineering, and a big fan of AI, coding, science, history, and philosophy.

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