Table of Contents
Key Catch ups
Introduction
With the constant and uninterrupted development in science and technology, it is very difficult to guess how far, how much time and what else will we able to create and innovate. According to the experts, the future of the world appears to be dominated by Artificial Intelligence. And the time is assumed to be not so far when almost every aspect of our life revolves around AI assistance in some or the other way.
The term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ was first coined decades ago by John McCarty in 1956 at Dartmouth Conference where he specified the scope and goals of Artificial Intelligence (AI). He defined AI as the science and engineering of making intelligent machine.
In a sense, AI is a technique of getting machines to work and behave like humans. In the recent past, AI has been able to accomplish this by creating machines and robots that are being used in wide range of fields including military, law, video games, healthcare, robotics, business analytics and many more. However, many AI applications are not perceived as AI because we are often prone to think of AI as robots. But the truth is AI has found its way to our daily lives. It has become so general that we don’t realize that we use them most of the times.
Scientifically, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a wide-ranging branch of computer science that has a collection of numerous different technologies working together to enable machines to work, sense, act and learn with human-like level of intelligence.
This term (AI) is frequently applied to the project of developing systems to provide with the intellectual processes characteristic of human, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experiences.
For an instance, if we think of how Google is able to give us such an accurate search results or how our Facebook feed always gives us content based on our interest? The answer to these questions is Artificial Intelligence.
So basically, the ability of a computer system or a machine to operate and process information like a human being is called Artificial Intelligence. It can learn, analyze, copy and adapt to new information and perform without much optimization.
Systems that think like humans
Systems that act like humans
Systems that think intelligently
Systems that act intelligently
Artificial Intelligence can be categorized into four categories which was been brought up by Arend Hintze.
The first types of AI are the machines which can react to certain situations but these machines do not have any sort of memory and hence cannot learn from past experiences. Computer chess game is a simple example of this first type of AI.
Though limited in scope and not easily altered, reactive machine AI can attain a level of complexity, and offers reliability when created to fulfill repeatable tasks.
The second type of AI are those machines which are capable of using past memory to form future ones and make decisions. This AI is more complex and presents greater possibilities than reactive machines. Nearly, all existing applications that we know of come under this category of AI. Self-driving cars, virtual assistants and chat bots are one of the excellent examples of this type.
While the previous two types of AI have been and are found in abundance, the next two types of AI exist, for now, either as concept, theory or a work in progress. The third types of AI are those machines which will be able to have emotions like beliefs, desires, opinions, thought processes, etc. Here, AI machines will have to perceive humans as individuals whose minds can be shaped by multiple factors, essentially ‘understanding’ humans.
This is the final stage of AI development which currently exists only hypothetically. The fourth type of AI would be the most sophisticated form of AI if it ever comes to existence. It would be able to have a sense of self-awareness, emotions and consciousness. One example of this AI is a robot that is considered to be self-aware by some is a robot ‘arm’ made by a group from Columbia University.
The purpose of AI is to aid human capabilities and help us make advanced decisions with extensive results. That’s the answer from technical point of view. From a philosophical perspective, AI has the potential to help humans live more comfortable and meaningful lives and help them manage the complex web of interconnected individuals, companies and nations to function in a manner that’s beneficial to all of humanity.
Currently, there are some main purposes in which AI is used in different fields that are:
Machine Learning
Healthcare
Provides financial services
Automotive
Improves decision making
Business process optimization
Creative work in Technologies
Natural language processing
Today, AI is making our daily life more comfortable and fast because of its increasing applications day-by-day. It is becoming essential for today’s time because it can solve complex problems with an efficient way in multiple fields such as:
Healthcare, where companies are trying to develop technologies for quick diagnosis; Artificial Intelligence would efficiently operate on patients without human supervision. IBM Watson is one excellent example of it.
Education, where AI can discover the needs of students. Then it can adapt according to their needs. AI can provide study help to students. Also, AI can automate grading of results hence, saving time and efforts.
Manufacturing, where AI can greatly increase the rate of work. Huge number of products can be manufactured through AI. As, a result, entire production process can take place without human intervention saving time and efforts.
Banking, where AI’s power to predict future scenarios by analyzing past behaviors, AI helps bank predict future outcomes and trends. This helps banks to identify fraud, detect ant-money laundering patterns and make customer recommendations.
Recruitment, which is the application of AI to the talent acquisition process, where machine learning can learn to shortlist our ideal candidate, as well as automate manual tasks in the recruitment process.
Agriculture, where AI systems are helping to improve the overall harvest quality and accuracy known as precision agriculture. AI technology helps in detecting disease in plants, pests and poor nutrition of farms. AI sensors can detect and target weeds and then decide which herbicide to apply within region.
Voice-to-text features
Fraud protection and prevention
Ride-sharing applications (e.g. Uber, Ola, etc.)
Spam filters on E-mails
Facial Recognition
Google’s AI-powered predictions (e.g. Google Maps, etc.)
Search recommendations
Smart personal assistants (e.g. Siri, Alexa, etc.)
Plagiarism checkers and tools
To sum it up, AI looks all set to be the future of the world. Experts believe that AI would certainly become a part of human life soon. AI would completely change the way we view our World. We are currently living in the greatest advancements of AI in history. It has emerged to be the next best thing in technology and has impacted the future of almost every field. There is greater need for professionals in the fields of AI due to the increase in demand. According to WEF, 133 million new Artificial Intelligence jobs are said to be created by Artificial Intelligence by the year 2022. Yes, AI is the future.
Key Catch ups
Artificial Intelligence is an intelligent entity that is created by humans. It is capable of performing tasks intelligently without getting a straight-forward instruction to do so.
We make use of AI in our daily lives without even realizing it. Spotify, Siri, Google Maps, YouTube, all of these applications make use of AI for their functioning.
The term Artificial Intelligence was first coined by John McCarthy. He is considered as the father of AI.
There are 4 types of Artificial Intelligence based upon their functioning namely :
* Reactive Machines
* Limited Memory
* Theory of Mind
* Self-Aware
The basic purpose of AI is to enable computers and machines to perform intellectual tasks such as problem solving, decision making, perception, and understanding human communication.
AI is everywhere today. It has paved its way into various industries. Be it gaming, healthcare, agriculture, recruitment and so on.
Did you know that the facial recognition feature on our phones uses AI? Google Maps also makes use of AI in its applications, and it is a part of our daily lives more than we know it.
Spam filters on Emails, Voice-to-text features, search recommendations, fraud protection and prevention, ride-sharing applications are some examples of AI and its applications.