Artificial Intelligence Since ancient times, people have been thinking of designing machines that will replicate human intelligence. The concept of thinking machines appears in Greek myths like the 'Talos of Crete'. John McCarthy coined the term, 'artificial intelligence' in 1956. He defines artificial intelligence as the science and engineering of making intelligent machines. AI researchers hope to develop intelligent machines, which can perceive, learn and reason like humans. General intelligence is their long-term goal. By general intelligence they mean to incorporate other aspects like social intelligence, judgment, common sense, robotics, and self-awareness into machines. Researchers dream of bringing into machines, factors such as wisdom and the ability to feel, which only humans possess. An important concern regarding the application of artificial intelligence is about ethics and moral values. Is it ethically correct to create replicas of human beings? Do our moral values allow us to recreate intelligence? Intelligence is a gift of nature. It may not be right to install it into a machine to make it work for our benefit. Machines may be able to store enormous amounts of data, but the storage, access, and retrieval is not as effective as in case of the human brain. They may be able to perform repetitive tasks for long, but they do not get better with experience, like humans do. They are not able to act any different from what they are programmed to do. Though this is mostly seen as an advantage, it may work the other way, when a situation demands one to act in way different from the usual. Machines may not be as efficient as humans in altering their responses depending on the changing situations.