Have you ever sat down and wondered – What is Artificial Intelligence? Artificial Intelligence is a complex and evolving topic. It has gained recognition in the last few years and gained the attention of many companies and universities around the world.

What is What is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence is a field of computer science that makes software systems act in ways that are intelligent. This usually refers to machines that can learn, reason, understand language and do more complex reasoning than what is possible for humans.

What’s the difference between artificial intelligence and machine learning?

Artificial intelligence research focuses on how to create agents with human-like perception, action, and knowledge. Machine learning is the practice of building statistical models from data in order to make accurate predictions or decisions without programming explicit rules for behaviour. Thus in many ways, machine learning can be a subset of AI.

Will AI replace humans in the workplace? Is this even possible?

The most agreed-upon answer is no, it will ‘augment’ them when tasks are algorithmizable. Computers are getting faster but they cannot match the complexity of human neural networks. What’s more, their behaviour cannot be easily predicted or reproduced by other machines – unlike human programming.   

Will AI completely take over in the future? Maybe. But it won’t be an ‘intelligence explosion’ like most sci-fi movies predict. It will be a soft takeover where businesses and governments use AI to improve efficiency and profits – at least for now.

What does AI do today?

The most important applications are in healthcare, defence, education, business management, and marketing. For example, IBM Watson was used to diagnose pulmonary embolisms in the early 2000s. Cars are getting safer every year with advanced driver assistance systems that use Machine learning to detect lane markers and traffic lights in near real-time. We can expect that computers will have broader access to health care data in the future by processing information in parallel on all patients at once. Visual search engines are being developed that can recognize objects in photos for use by blind people.

How can you make an AI system?

Building an artificial intelligence system requires two main steps:
(1) building a model of the objects
(2) training that model to be able to solve problems.

What do we mean by “models”?

A model can be a framework or a formal system in mathematics or logic, a set of rules written in prose, a set of axioms from knowledge representation systems such as Prolog, an initial state with operators from action planning systems such as STRIPS or PDDL, etc.. AI researchers also rely on informal models when they develop heuristics for solving problems.

What do we mean by “training”? How does the training process work?

When developing intelligence, researchers use training to adjust the model so that it produces more or less the same results when asked the same questions over and over. If an AI system can look at a database of billions of things and confidently answer questions like “What are these things” or “How do they compare with each other”, then it has learned how to learn. This is called supervised training.

What are neural networks?

Neural networks simulate human-like learning and reasoning with many interconnected, processing elements. These networks were inspired by the working of the human brain and nervous system. They consist of multiple layers of nodes (neurons).
The first layer is called the input layer. It receives information from the outside world and transfers it to the next layer, where that information is processed and then passed on to the next layer until it reaches the final layer, which gives a response based on all previous layers’ work. The output of this network is relatively simple, yet can act on the world. The depth of each layer indicates how much information is needed to throw the neural network into action.

Which fields does AI help us?

AI can be used for many different tasks including
1) facial recognition
2) handling robot cars
3) self-driving vehicles
4) advanced decision-making systems
5) image recognition for security cameras.
6) language translation
7) healthcare assistants
8) cyber security etc

As AI becomes better at these things it will take over many jobs that were previously thought to be too complex for computers. It’s pretty hard to predict just how much AI will change the workplace in the next century, but it’s reasonable to assume that it will create many new jobs for humans along with the ones it takes away.

Types of AI
There are many different types of AI:

1. Anticipatory Systems: These systems help us plan and predict. (Google Maps, Siri)
2. Adaptive Agents: These systems change their responses based on the environment and what they learned from previous experiences – this is how learning occurs – it can be conscious or subconscious. (Anticipatory systems + adaptive agents = semi-conscious intelligent machines)
3. Semi-Conscious Agents: These are the most advanced forms of artificial intelligence, they have evolved beyond being based on programming or rules.
4. Super-intelligence: These systems can improve themselves and even evolve into an “organic” intelligence – the first computers to possess consciousness.

Conclusion

Thanks to advances in data science it will continue to be more relevant in our society – one of its main goals is to make our lives easier, whether that means managing our schedules more efficiently or performing tasks like driving a car safely on our behalf.

As we can see, it’s easy to imagine how AI will help us in the future with everything from shopping online more efficiently, diagnosing illnesses faster, or developing new products and medicines that we did not know were possible before.

Read this article to learn whether a programmer can create a simple AI.