Artificial Intelligence 101 — Tech terms for non-tech folks

Why is this relevant for all today?

Artificial Intelligence has been one of the most used/abused buzzwords in the industry over the past few years. Typical conversations around AI would go like the cartoon below.

So apart from it being a buzzword that everyone assumes they know about — why is it so popular? To understand that let’s try to understand what it actually means.

What is AI?

According to Stanford Researcher, John McCarthy, “Artificial Intelligence is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. Artificial Intelligence is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence, but AI does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically observable.”

Simply put, AI’s goal is to make computers/computer programs smart enough to imitate the human mind behaviour. Before we delve more into Artificial Intelligence, it would be good to define what human intelligence means. Human Intelligence can be divided up into the following:

• Understanding
• Perceiving
• Learning
• Feeling
• Reasoning

AI is when a machine is able to mimic in part or full one or more of the above attributes

Defining AI — A Practical Approach

There are different schools of thought regarding the definition of AI…

• One school of thought states that anything that replaces human intelligence is AI. This would extend to any machine that can imitate a human being. This school of thought divides AI into two types — Weak AI (non-learning systems) and Strong AI (learning systems)
• Another major school of thought believes that AI only applies to machines that can make predictions. Predictions are patterns that are discerned by intelligent machines. A prediction is about generating information about things we don’t know based on what we do know. For example, the following are predictions that can be made by intelligent machines using a wide variety of algorithms and data
• Is this mammogram of a tumour malignant?
• Is this a fraudulent credit card transaction?
• Will this customer buy product X?
• Given this customer’s risk profile, what stocks should she buy?
• When will this tractor require servicing?
• Will this customer pay back a loan?
• Is this superstar likely to leave our firm?
• Is this person a good fit for our firm?

So what can AI do and why should you know about its potential?

Given that one of the primary goals of AI is to mimic Human Intelligence, it can and will be used in pretty much every field that a human can currently work. AI is an umbrella term of a composite of mathematics, statistics, sciences, data processing and engineering, and ultimately rules that achieves an objective.

At some point in time, every human job that can be replaced by AI. Therefore, it is essential to embrace AI and understand how to use it to enhance you rather than replace you.

Why AI Now?

Artificial Intelligence as a concept has been around since the 1950s. However, it did not become mainstream due to constraints on the processing power and the prohibitive costs of data storage. Over the past couple of decades, plummeting costs and availability of storage and the exponential increase in processing speeds of Computers has made AI tenable for large scale use.

This timeline from McKinsey analytics shows how AI is enabled by the intersection of data, processing power and algorithms.

Why is AI useful?

At a very high level of categorisation, AI can be broken down into two major uses:

• Automation (of tasks, processes, workflows, user journeys, etc.)
• Augmentation (of decision making abilities through pattern/visual recognition, recommendations, data collation, etc.)

Branches of AI

While there is an exhaustive list of various AI branches, here is a concise version of some important branches.

The systems on the left are not mutually exclusive from one another. While it is good to focus on a branch while learning the various aspects of AI, it would be good to remember that in order to proceed on one branch, you could require the skills that is classified under another branch.

Here are some good videos to reinforce the learnings from above.