Humanity has repeatedly tried… and failed… to achieve anything like whole originally Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI… a computer system with human-level problem solving, lateral thinking, and general intellect. This repeated failure ended up leading to the prominence of the Exalted as the Federation’s only computerized intelligence capable of working multiple systems… but that isn’t to say that humanity has failed at making machine intelligence altogether.
Artificial Narrow Intelligence, or ANI, is something that humanity is quite good at. After all, not even the smartest and most talented humans have won a game of chess against an engine in decades, even as of 2020. In the 26th century, almost any given task can be controlled by an AMI, so long as that task is narrowly defined. After all, a chess board only has so many options… analyzing a situation and considering all options are things that AMIs do well. Discarding the options that are bad is something they do not… and why human oversight is required. We call these systems Artificial Machine Intelligence Entities, AMIs or Amy-s.
Almost all advanced mechanical systems are run by AMIs aboard Federation ships, but the limited AI can’t understand the needs of other systems… balancing between the needs and making decisions is the roll of the human crew and operators. They can gather information and act on it far faster and more efficiently, but they are bad at deciding which information to act on. For this reason, AMIs cannot be autonomous… they would break down rapidly outside of supervision as the systems they are dependent on fall apart.
John Drake's Stories 