Have you watched Ex-Machina or Terminator or any movie that portrays wars between humans and machines? It is remarkable how machines have evolved from just being carbon, wires and circuits to possessing reasoning. One can only imagine the future of artificial intelligence. AI has come to stay and there is no doubt about it.
The word “Artificial Intelligence”, whose abridged form is AI, was discovered by John McCarthy . Wiktionary defines it as the branch of computer science dealing with the reproduction or mimicking of human level intelligence or self-awareness, knowledge, conscience and thought in computer programs. Actually, in layman’s language, it’s the ability of a computer to think on its own, void of humans’ assistance but stirred up by humans’ intelligence.
Measure of Artificial Intelligence
Before a computer or machine is declared to be artificially intelligent, it must have passed through 4 stages, which are:
1 Cognitive Modeling Approach: this checks if the machine is capable of observing and acquiring knowledge through thoughts and senses.
2. Rational Agent Approach: It checks if the machine is dynamic and can pick out the best option needed in a situation.
3. Turing Test: this test checks if a machine is able to hold conversations with the help of a programming language.
4. The law of thought: this explains why a machine is reasonable.
Categories of AI
A. Weak AI: these types can only perform limited operations i.e one task at a time. e.g Siri, Ok Google.
B. Strong AI: they have the same capacity as a human and therefore can learn intellectually e.g Self-driving cars.
C. Super AI: this class of AI can perform beyond humans’ capacity and with even better efficiency.
EVERYDAY AI
There are numerous benefits of artificial intelligence from aiding new inventions, endless labour, minimal errors, exploring beyond human limitation in risky situations to unbiased decision making. All the aforementioned benefits give AI the upper hand in taking charge of some day-to-day operations. Some of which include:
1. Online shopping
2. Google search
3. Chatbots : robots operation in digital aiding human resources.
4. Navigation: maps
5. Weather
6. Face Recognition
7. Google lens and OCR
8. Quick reply on messenger
9. Smart Compose on Gmail
10. Magic Banking
12. Virtual doctors
13. Translators
14. Surgery: AI-assisted robotic surgery.
15. Facebook friends recommendation: Facebook uses the history of data to give suggestions.
16. Netflix Recommendation: ever wondered why you are so hooked up with movies? It uses the same procedure as Facebook friends recommendation.
FUTURE RISKS OF AI
- Threat to human civilization: AI will be a great threat to human development because, in the next couple of years, every human activity will have been replaced by an AI and this will leave humans docile in performance.
- AI Terrorism: just like their human form, AI would possibly be capable of terrorism. This would be a great threat to humanity as AI may possess weapons capable of destroying it at the same time as not being affected by it.
- Over-optimisation: strong AI would develop its own sense of thoughts and redesign itself to become independent.
- Accelerated Hacking: Freedom to source data from anywhere by AI would lead to performing unclear responsibility and lead to violation of personal privacy through hacking.
- AI Bias: as a result of over-optimizing, AI would serve as a risk by introducing bias programs into its decision making.
- Emotionless Humanoids: as the future of AI keeps brightening, the human world will be filled with emotionless humanoids interacting with emotional people. This may bring about conflict in understanding.
Related terms:
- Algorithm: collection of well-defined procedures that solve a mathematical problem.
- Machine Learning: a field of study concerned with the design and development of algorithms and techniques that allow computers to learn.
- Sentient: possessing human like self-awareness and intelligence.
- Computer vision: an arm of Artificial Intelligence that enables computers to obtain information from visual inputs.
- Cognitive computing: the art of mimicking the way a human brain works through computers and machines.
Related Articles:
Artificial Intelligence Meaning
DARQ- The futuristic technology.
Further reading:
How artificial intelligence is transforming the world.
Artificial Intelligence and the future of work (2022) can help you boost your career in AI while preparing for great job opportunities.
