Artificial Intelligence for The Layman
AI for non-technical professionals
Let me begin by simply discussing the term ‘Intelligence’. Intelligence is the capacity for logic, understanding, comprehension, self-awareness, learning, planning, reasoning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. All biological creatures have some extent of natural intelligence.
Have you observed how nicely ants follow a particular path for finding food with the help of a chemical called ‘pheromone’? Or
How do honey bees work in an organized manner following a colony-like structure? Or
How have we naturally evolved generations after generations into an intelligent species?
This all is because of the natural intelligence that all the creatures possess. We (human beings) are considered to be the most intelligent species on this planet. You may think of the various tasks that we do flawlessly.
Now that we have briefly discussed natural intelligence, let me explore the term Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI has sprouted out of a simple question: “Can machines think and act just like humans do?” raised by the famous computer scientist Alan Turing in the 1950s. This question has been relevant since the initial days of AI, decades ago. It is still relevant today.
AI is an effort to automate intellectual tasks normally performed by humans. Now the question arises:
How can we artificially induce intelligence?
In simple terms, we can do so to a limited extent (Mostly for a particular application) using a huge amount of relevant existing data (called the training dataset) and a learning algorithm (In simple terms, an algorithm is a sequence of step-wise instructions to solve a problem). The training dataset is used to teach the learning algorithm how to classify or predict, or perform any other functions depending on the task for which it is being trained.
In today’s world, AI is omnipresent right from simple assistive applications like floor cleaning or a chat assistant to sensitive matters like warfare.
Let us look at a few standard definitions of AI.
“The automation of activities that we associate with human thinking, activities such as decision-making, problem solving, learning.” (Bellman, 1978).
AI is “the study of how to make computers do things at which, at the moment, people are better.” (Rich and Knight, 1991).
So, what could you think are the things at which people are better at the moment? (In 1991, there were too many such things. In the past three decades, AI has made significant progress and has done comparable or even better than humans in specific areas like pattern recognition, classification, etc. But there are still many things at which, people are much better). Let me know your views in the comment box. As of now, let me point out a few areas.
👉 Humans are better at demonstrating and comprehending complex emotions as per the situation.
👉 Humans exhibit better common sense.
👉 Humans are better at general intelligence tasks (All types of tasks, not only for which they are trained).
👉 Humans are better at multi-tasking and can operate in a massively parallel way.
👉 Humans are better at continuously learning and adapting according to the changes in the environment without being explicitly guided to do so.
👉 Humans also have the power to reproduce and naturally evolve over the generations to become a better version of themselves.
Let us now also have a look at things where AI has proven to be better than human intelligence.
👉 AI is capable of processing information faster than humans (This is due to the high processing power of the hardware).
👉 AI systems don’t forget the information or learning that has been done by them whereas humans may sometimes forget due to various reasons.
👉 AI systems have proven to be more accurate for specialized pattern recognition tasks than humans (Like image classification, handwritten digit recognition, etc.).
👉 AI models are usually free from bias (Unless the humans who have trained the AI model have used biased images/data for training).
Happy Reading!
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