Written by Carol A
With the release of Rajnikanth’s widely acclaimed film Robot, there came a novel perception of the term Artificial Intelligence among the people of India. It got the audience thinking — what is AI? Is AI a threat or an opportunity for improving society? How does Chitti’s wig not fall off after all those stunts? (Why did they make a sequel?)
There exists no set-in-stone definition, but one way to define AI would be the ability of a machine to demonstrate human-like intelligence. Problem-solving, reasoning, and learning are a few of the many human skills aimed to be simulated by AI machines.
History
Science fiction came one step closer to reality when Alan Turing questioned, “Can machines think?”. The release of his paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence and the subsequent Turing test in 1950 established the core idea of AI.
(GK: CAPTCHA is a kind of Turing test, so the next time you’re annoyed at it, you know who to blame).
During an academic conference in 1956, John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence. This generation of scientists laid down principles that would become the fundamental building blocks of the AI we know today.
How is AI used?
AI is a vast topic and can be written about in volumes. For now, we can broadly classify it into Narrow AI and General AI.
Narrow AI consists of intelligent systems that carry out tasks under specific constraints. Apple’s Siri is an example of Narrow AI where the machine has only limited abilities to perform tasks. It displays no genuine awareness or intelligence, so Siri can’t exactly give you relationship advice but rather can play heartbreak songs for you on loop.
General or Strong AI is usually seen in movies by machines like the Terminator or Data from Star Trek. It is the ability of the device to perform all the tasks a human is capable of achieving. While it doesn’t quite exist today, AI specialists are divided on when this would become a reality.
The subsets of AI include Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Neural networks, Computer Vision and Robotics.
Machine Learning accounts for the great bulk of recent advances in AI. It is the ability of the machine to feed on a dataset and learn how to carry out a task rather than programming it to do the same. Sound familiar? (*cough* students teaching themselves during online college *cough*).
A subset of ML is deep learning, in which neural networks expand into vast networks with several layers and are trained using massive amounts of data. They consist of a set of algorithms designed for clustering and classifying.
Deep Neural Networks have fueled the capacity of the computer to perform tasks such as Computer Vision. Computer Vision is the ability of the computer to see, observe and analyze real-life images and data.
Finally, our all-time Hollywood favourite — Robotics, which has emerged as a hotbed of AI research. It is the design, manufacture, and operation of robots and is responsible for controlling intelligent outcomes.
Tech Giants competing in the AI race
Much of the AI that we see today is anchored by multi-billion-dollar companies, each racing to make it to the top. The advent of virtual assistants has been one of the most apparent manifestations of the AI war. Its chief competitors are Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google Assistant.
These assistants rely primarily on voice recognition and Natural Language Processing. NLP is the breaking down of human language to help computers understand text or speech. However, their associated services, such as Google Lens, can translate text from photos and allow you to search using images. While Apple’s Siri might have had precedence in the earlier years, Google’s Assistant and Alexa have marked their domain in the AI space with their ability to answer a wide range of questions and demonstrate various skills.
AI in everyday life
With competitive building, every effort is made to make AI a part of our day-to-day lives. In 2020, General Motors and Honda unveiled the Cruise Origin, an electric-powered driverless automobile. (Wikihow: To put the car on flight mode to save battery life because my dumbass forgot to charge it.)
Computers can recognize human speech with an accuracy of 95%. Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence and Research group recently announced the development of a system that can accurately transcribe spoken English just as a human transcriber would.
Facial recognition systems are widely used for defense and security purposes in several countries. AI has a significant role to play in the healthcare system too. The recent accomplishment by Google’s AlphaFold 2 machine-learning algorithm is projected to cut the time it takes to develop new drugs from months to hours.
Can Google also come up with something that cuts down procrastination time? Asking for a friend.
The applications of AI further extend to gaming, finance, artificial creativity, and so much more. And all this is just the tip of the iceberg.
With AI being used in various fields, it may pose a threat to employment.
According to the co-founder of Coursera, Andrew NG, while specific tasks and skills could get repetitive, monotonous, and boring for a human, these same tasks can be performed easily by technology, which could pose a significant risk of technological unemployment. While some believe that for every job that has been replaced, new ones will be created in its place, there is no certainty on how fast these jobs will be created or if the unemployed would even possess the required skills for the new job positions.
(This is your sign to finish that Coursera course you started and upgrade your skills #notanad)
Human meets AI
With the growing era of ‘big data,’ it is a common worry if AI will bring about the end of humankind or if it will be the reason the human race thrives. Physicist Stephan Hawking warned that AI could evolve at a faster rate than humans and could result in our extinction. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk stated that AI is a “fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.”
However, some AI specialists find the notion of AI taking over the world and causing human destruction ridiculous. The general intelligence that humans possess is way different from the narrow intelligence shown by machines today. So it looks like the Terminator has to wait a couple of decades before he paves his path into our world.
The Future
For now, AI is steadily growing and improving. It is the big thing of our generation. As annoying as it may be, any customer care service first directs your call to their company’s virtual assistant. Netflix drops its suggestions based on the content you’ve previously viewed. Your first week after downloading COD-mobile is just matches with bots, so don’t feel too proud if you’re MVP. We can expect driverless cars to be fully functional and on the road in a couple of years. Its acceptance in society, however, is questionable.
The manner in which AI grows into society will have significant implications on our foreseeable future. Several important discussions and decisions will be needed on ethical and moral grounds. It is essential that privacy issues, legal matters, conflicts, and policies are rightly dealt with. AI has the potential to revolutionize the world and become the most impactful human innovation in history.
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