Artificial Intelligence. It’s exciting, Terminator and Skynet, are they on route?
Artificial intelligence is all around us. AI helps protect you from fraud, schedules medical procedures, aids in customer service, and even assists in choosing TV shows and cleaning your house.
The term AI refers to Artificial Intelligence; you may also hear this being referred to as ML “Machine Learning”. In very simple terms, it is the simulation of human intelligence processed by machines, especially computer systems. These processes include learning (the acquisition of information and rules for using the information), reasoning (using rules to reach approximate or definite conclusions) and self-correction.
The official definition of AI is the ‘theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision making and translation between languages’, which can be simplified to ‘the creation of intelligent machines that work and react like humans’.
However, AI is an evolving area with many subsets, which means the definition of AI has been changed and manipulated over time. One subset of AI is machine learning, which involves teaching a machine to learn how we learn. It can then draw conclusions from large quantities of data and adjust its activities based on those conclusions.
ORIGINS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLEGENCE
The term “Artificial Intelligence” has been around since the 1950s, but a lot has changed since then. Today, AI is referenced in the news, books, films, and TV shows, and the exact definition is often misinterpreted.
One of the first incarnations of Artificial Intelligence was the Bombe Machine developed by Alan Turing in 1939. The machine was developed in order to crack German coded messages using the Enigma machine during WWII.
The term AI was not brought to light however, until 1956 during the Dartmouth Conference, in which the term was adopted.
There have been times of reduced Artificial Intelligence funding and development, these have been referred to as AI Winters, the reasons for the stagnation is that the tech is unable to process the data, which it is being presented.
FUTURE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLEGENCE
The potential for AI to underpin and grow the world of work is unbounded, but while it can create a thriving marketplace, it could grow to take over the entire economic system like an intelligent virus.
So where would the value of humans sit in a world of machines?
1. Assisted Intelligence – Widely available today, improves what people and organizations are already doing. A simple example is the GPS navigation that offers directions to drivers and adjusts to road conditions.
2. Augmented Intelligence – Emerging today, helps people and organizations to do things they could not otherwise do. For example, car ride-sharing businesses could not exist without the combination of programs that organize the service.
3. Autonomous Intelligence – Being developed for the future, establishes machines that act on their own. An example of this will be self-driving vehicles, when they come into widespread use.
LANDSCAPE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLEGENCE
As you can see from the above diagram, there are varying levels of Artificial Intelligence, the terms narrow and deep AI can be misinterpreted, however the most commonly understood definition of these coined terms would be:
NARROW AI
This is AI that is good at performing a single task, such as playing chess, making purchase suggestions, sales predictions and weather forecasts. Computer vision, natural language processing is still at the current stage narrow AI.
DEEP AI
Deep AI, also known as human-level AI or strong AI, is the type of Artificial Intelligence that can understand and reason its environment as a human would.
There is a further level to this, however we are only beginning to tread into Deep AI, therefore the Super Deep AI is hardly worth to mention, however it would enhance on everything we know and understand everything at once. A possible example of this would be Marvel’s, Vision, or Watchmen’s, Dr Manhattan.
The processing power is unfathomable and unlikely to be experienced in our lifetime, despite the quickly enhancing processing power by which computer processing speed is doubled every 18 months, known as Moore’s Law.
The processing power is unfathomable and unlikely to be experienced in our lifetime, despite the quickly enhancing processing power doubling of computer processing speed every 18 months, known as Moore’s Law.
