AI has been a field within computer science since at least the 1950s. It encompasses algorithms for making decisions, which is why so many technologies are labeled this way. “Intelligence” may seem like an odd choice of terminology (some people conflate it with sentience or similar), but general machine intelligence is one goal of this study, and the applications of AI are putative steps to that end.
Back when those guys started talking about what methods could get us there, things like decision trees, symbolic manipulation, neural nets, were all potential pathways that were on the table. So these get included in the field because that’s where and to what end they were produced.
Another thing is that intelligence can be narrow in its domain. A character in a video game that needs to move from point A to point B can do so following something like the A* pathfinding algorithm. In the domain of graph traversal/pathfinding, it’s hard to imagine something much more intelligent (or fit to solve the problem) than A* despite being a simple algorithm.
But yeah, as a marketing term it is kind of silly since most people don’t know what it means. It remains a useful categorization for a broad field of study/research in CS though.
They are a good fit here and my wife and I use ours a lot, but they are still early in traffic-calming efforts so it can be dicey actually getting to trails even on low-speed residential streets (drivers seem pretty aggressive and impatient here).
You are lucky if streets have a bike lane (but some places downtown have separated lanes which is sweet). The more common thing you’ll see is multi-use streets, which is just a picture of a bike painted on the street and does literally nothing to calm the kind of SUV/Dodge Ram drivers you’re most worried about. That said there are official bike routes pretty much anywhere in the city.
Property crime is also pretty high so I’m still nervous about bringing them anywhere I’ll be away from it for an extended period, too. (Even though to a bike thief it ends up just being a really heavy manual bike, I am not sure enough that they care.)
Some of this sentiment is probably because my wife and I have only been urban biking for about six months and we’ll figure it out eventually, I wish there were better resources to gauge this concerns from fellow cyclists and not the city.
All in all I think the city planners are doing a good job to encourage biking and e-bikes with policy and changes to infrastructure, but it still has some ways to go.