Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Remember the robot cat from Tom and Jerry? The one that almost got Tom kicked out for not being able to catch Jerry. Well, that cat was an artificially operated robot, which was created specifically to eliminate any sort of mouse it encountered.

In real life, we have a similar AI-functioning robotic cat, ‘Maicat’, which is the project of a Macroact AI startup. Although it wasn’t created for catching naughty mice like Jerry, Maicat is an advanced companion cat that can empathize with human emotion, allowing you to bond as you’d do with a normal cat. The Maicat is perfect for all those individuals who work late and don’t have an ideal environment to raise real cats in their homes.

Now a question must have arisen in your mind; how can a robotic cat empathize with human emotions? The answer is pretty simple: it is all the doing of AI, consequently, with the rapid growth of science and technology in the modern world, AI is also evolving with countries like China, Japan, the USA, the UK, and Germany leading the evolution.

To know how AI works, let me briefly introduce what is AI, its earliest program written, and its types.

What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a branch of the computer science field in which machine mimics human intelligence to think and work like a human, for example, speech recognition, problem-solving, learning, and planning.

The earliest record of an AI program

Christopher Strachey wrote an initial program of artificial intelligence in 1951. The program he created was known as Strachey checker, which ran on a Ferranti Mark I computer at the University of Manchester, England. By the mid of the year 1952, the program could play the complete game of checker at a reasonable pace.

In terms of capabilities, AI has three types:

1. Artificial Narrow Intelligence — it is used to solve one specific given problem, like the robot cat from Tom and Jerry only had a specific task to catch mice, or to give you a clear example of daily life, Siri is an example of narrow artificial intelligence.
2. Artificial General Intelligence — it is where the machine mimics can learn and understand any analytical task as the human being can, furthermore it allows the machine to apply critical thinking processes in contrasting contexts.
3. Artificial Super Intelligence- when the machine can execute tasks better than human beings.

We can further divide AI into four categories of its functionality:

1. Reactive Machine — the most pivotal function which relies on present data provided to it to solve specific tasks given to it, and cannot use its previous data stored within its memory as it doesn’t have those abilities to do so. The most common everyday life example of it is the Netflix recommendation engine.
2. Limited Memory — in this function, the machine acquires the ability to store previous data and use it to make current decisions. The function is used in self-driving cars like Tesla.
3. Theory of Mind — it is a theoretical concept that is yet to be achieved. In this function, the machine can comprehend human and animal emotions and thoughts. Although there have been attempts to achieve such a machine, it’s not on the complete level. The famous robot Sophia from Hanson Robotic is one of its examples.
4. Self-awareness — it is again one theoretical concept that science can achieve after the master the theory of mind function. In this function, the machine would adopt consciousness similar to a human and it would have self-awareness regarding the reason for its existence.

Future of AI

According to a report by the World Economic Forum, AI is said to create more jobs in terms of artificial intelligence and won’t replace the human workforce, although this topic is more likely a debate about whether AI would take over the world for good or bad. But one thing for sure is that AI would digitalize the world twenty years from now and will play a vital role in the healthcare and employment industry.