Introduction To Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence, also abbreviated as AI is just what it sounds like, intelligence that isn't real. Artificial Intelligence is a hot trend and is rapidly growing these days, artificial intelligence is everywhere from smart home devices to video games and virtual personal assistants (Cortana, Alexa, Siri). So as you might know, robots can think but how do they? The intelligence that robots and drones and other machines possess are not there by default but is actually programmed into a robot and that intelligence is known as artificial intelligence. Basically, artificial intelligence is machines doing things that normally require human intelligence like visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, etc. Artificial Intelligence was first named by John McCarthy in 1956 at now called The Dartmouth Conference where the phrase artificial intelligence was defined. Also, in 1962, the first industrial robot company was founded, Unimation.
How Artificial Intelligence Is Similar to Humans
Artificial Intelligence is very similar to humans but still is very far behind from becoming as smart as a human being, for example Amazon's Echo is smart but it can sometimes accidentally here her name and start talking. Though artificial intelligence isn't perfect, it has a lot of benefits such as artificial intelligence can do jobs with greater precision and accuracy, painstaking or laborious tasks that are hard or not possible for humans, ;simulating surgery, and one main benefit that separates humans from artificial intelligence or robots is that robots or devices with artificial intelligence do not contain emotions and they do not lie. Slowly artificial intelligence is advancing as you might know smartphones can now recognize fingerprints, faces, and now might be able to scan your eye (See figure 1)!
Why We Need AI And It Is Inevitable
We do need AI as it is very important and you probably use AI everyday without even knowing it. Some ways you are using AI everyday are
VIDEO GAMES
If you play Pokémon Go or any other games you are using artificial intelligence. The logic behind the game is artificial intelligence, it is put or programmed into the game. Suppose you're playing pokemon go as it is one of the most popular games these days and you click on a pokemon and it goes close to the pokemon and allows you to throw pokeballs. This was because of artificial intelligence as the program was told to do that by the programmer who made the game.
E-COMMERCE
An AI program named collaborating filter helps companies see consumers' buying patterns like the online shopping platform, amazon.com uses the collaborating filter which shows you the recommended things according to the products you bought. Like if you buy a Harry Potter book it might recommend you Eoin Colfer's or other Harry Potter books as the books by both authors are similar.
You probably use a device everyday, you are probably on a device right now! These devices are run through AI. Your apps are run on AI such as Apple maps or google maps or waze determine your location using artificial intelligence. Google Photos, an app that can distinguish between children and adults, it can tell what a canoe is or a book is, etc. If you use laptops, than AI is in that too. Virtual Personal Assistants (VPA) are a pretty good example of AI as they use AI. If you have a windows laptop you should have Cortana which is a VPA and also if you have a mac than you might have Siri which is also a VPA.
How And Why Artificial Intelligence Is Growing
It is hard to say how long Artificial Intelligence will go because as you know AI is just going to keep growing as we advance. Currently, as the statistics show, Artificial Intelligence revenue is about to experience exponential growth and this is just the start, Artificial Intelligence revenue will be more than 11x by 2024 than it is right now (See figure 2). There are many people who believe,not in the facts but the myths, AI destroys jobs, makes us stupid, destroys privacy, enables hidden bias and abuse, and some people also believe that AI someday might even kill us all and take over the world; the reality is that AI benefits us in many ways unlike the myths, the facts are that AI spurs job creation, enables smarter decision, it doesn't destroy privacy as it is bound by laws and can't go that far, and that artificial intelligence is designed to avoid human biases (See figure 3). $70 billion is the estimated size of the AI-based analytics market by 2020 which is an impactful growth from $8.2 billion which was in 2013, according to IDC (See figure 4). The potential impact to the global economy from self-driving cars by 2025 will approximately be $1.9 trillion. Though Artificial Intelligence has some drawbacks like it can have some bugs or it can crash but clearly the benefits outweigh the risks!
AI is for sure going to become big, the real question to ask is, When?
Sources
Hammond, Kris. "What Is Artificial Intelligence?" Computerworld. N.p., 10 Apr. 2015. Web. 12 Aug. 2016. .
"Chapter 3 Everyday AI." Everyday AI. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Aug. 2016. .
Atkinson, Robert D. "ITIF." "It's Going to Kill Us!" and Other Myths About the Future of Artificial Intelligence. N.p., 6 June 2016. Web. 12 Aug. 2016. .
