Can Intelligence be harnessed to 1s and 0s?
Artificial Intelligence. What picture do you get? A machine made of tin and iron structured as a human carrying operations instructed by a human being? If so, you are a fan of artificial intelligence and your brain has been wired by science fiction movies to think alike. So, is this true? What exactly is Artificial Intelligence? How does Artificial Intelligence even work?Can we bring the fantasies in the science fiction movies to reality? If these questions ever popped up your head, be seated, put on that seat belt because we are going in for a ride into the world of AI and robots.
Lets ponder on two intricately connected word for a moment: Artificial Intelligence. The fictional movies has put a different perception through our mind about AI. Although the fictional movies are not entirely incorrect on the portrayal of AI, they are generalizing the AI as a whole. Movies like Ex-machina, Her, and Matrix, just to name a few, has put AI to a whole new level. Though they add a certain context to the situation of AI in the present world, they still generalize the whole aspect of AI and make it either protagonist or an antagonist. These generalizations are good; they help to broaden our horizons and imaginations. Back to the question. Have you ever written a simple “Hello World” program? Congrats! You have made an AI. But wait, it isn’t anything to the movies I’ve watched? Yes, it all depends on how sophisticated AI you want to make.
This brings us to the topic: how does the robot in the present world work? Particularly, you might have heard about Alpha Go and Deep Mind; we’ll get a certain gist about everything, so bare with me.
Do you remember yourself as a child? The person who ate mud, and peed on your trousers is a smart and diligent person reading an article about Artificial Intelligence. How did you be the person you are today? Ponder yourself. Education. Experience. Life. These words came across your mind right? Let’s move further and build a concrete case. Do you seek help from a professor who is moody or the one who is genial? Will you talk to the person who once you talk to him constantly nags and irritates you? What made you think the way you thought right now? It’s Experience. You know it is awful with the moody people and awesome with the friendly one. You know it is tiresome to handle irritative person. But heyyy? we were talking about AI? Stop messing with me! Okay, Let’s move on!
The way you thought is exactly how the researchers, and computer scientists are trying to put in to a computer. How? Pattern recognition. Most of the works of AI in the present world is based on Pattern recognition. The cool guys call it Machine Learning; even particularly Neural Networks, as the cool guys call it, is the most popular one. The computer scientists and engineers are basically taking a bunch of data like your thought: this is bad! don’t do it and this is good! do it, which makes the computer aware about the things he get to process. Let’s take a simple example to let you understand how this whole works out. When making a self driving cars, computer geeks put lots of photos of a clear road and mention it as okay to drive, and they take a photos of road with people, with rock, with cliff as don’t drive. This helps the computer to distinct what to do and what not. Also, this is fairly simple scenario of whether to drive or not; you may also want to consider what happens when a you may want to slow down or change direction. Here too you would put on these yes and no to the computer and it’ll learn.
This is how the computer people represented the experience you get into 1’s and 0’s to make a computer act. Surely, you need lots of experience to be a better person. Similarly, AI also becomes smarter if you put on a lot of information differentiating what should be done and what not. But be aware that you are surrounded by AIs; from that auto correction in your mobile to YouTube suggestion videos, these are all parts of Machine Learning.
So the last question about whether it is possible to make robots as shown on Fictional movies. Currently, the way human perceives particular instance of reality, and the way computer perceives is different.(Pfff Obviously! After all we are the most intellect species in this planet). There lies a huge gap, and it is our job to minimize it to a very small size. We need to understand these experiences we had, how we transformed from that cute, yet stupid child to intellect, yet ugly adult. Only then we will be able to make AI as in our fictional movies.
Definitely we can put this intelligence to just 1’s and 0’s; we’ve already have stored books, snaps of realities,i.e. photos into just two digits, and now it is the turn of intelligence and we need some smart minds to innovate to make it possible.
Zerone is an undergrad publication at I.O.E, Pulchowk focusing on People (their creative side, their thoughts, their lives) and Technology (the new, the old, everything).
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