AI: lighting the digital transformation fuse

2022 marked a quarter of a century since a cold IBM computer defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in a single combat. It was the first time that a living legend of strategy bit the dust against a handful of circuits, baptized as Deep Blue. That milestone was only the prologue to what we are experiencing today and what is yet to come: a world in which artificial intelligence plays an increasingly large and sophisticated role, both in the fields of innovation and in our daily lives.

Artificial intelligence is the field of computer science aimed at creating systems that operate autonomously in complex and changing environments. It defines the?ability of a digital system to perform tasks that are normally associated with human cognitive functions, such as thinking, reasoning, understanding, or assimilating and processing information. The term was coined by the computer scientist John McCarthy in 1956 and was formalized as a specific field of computer science at a workshop organized at Dartmouth College . Researchers there discussed how to build machines that use language and abstraction, solve human problems and are capable of self-improvement.

Thus,?today artificial intelligence is everywhere: in shopping recommendations, internet search engines, cell phone assistants, assisted driving, card fraud detection, disease imaging, COVID tests or factory robots. A series of aspects that, together, are giving way to the Forth Industrial Revolution.?

Thanks to the?amount of data available to train systems?and the improved computational power to process it, technology has evolved tremendously since its inception. Computing performance has increased a trillion-fold since 1956, and today a trillion megabytes of data are generated every day.

The great milestones of this technology have been set by IBM , which was one of its founders. At the beginning it created the artificial intelligence program that played checkers with great skill, as it demonstrated on television in 1956. Forty years later, in 1997, the supercomputer Deep Blue beat Kasparov, making it clear that a computer system can beat the human brain in a non-mechanical task. In 2011, the Watson computer, capable of reasoning and understanding human language, won the famous "Jeopardy!" quiz show. In 2016, 谷歌 AlphaGo program was crowned world champion of the strategy game "Go!" and in 2020, its AlphaFold program deciphered the folding of proteins: a very complex problem that biologists had been longing to solve for 50 years.

Artificial intelligence systems consist of several interrelated disciplines: Big Data, for example, focuses on processing large volumes of data so that algorithms can use them; the algorithms, in turn, are what give the systems their intelligence, and the chips do the processing, as in the case of Google Tensor.

There are several types of algorithms.?Machine learning algorithms detect patterns?by means of classification, regression, or clustering techniques. Algorithms can take the form of so-called "decision trees", "Bayesian networks" or "neural networks". The latter are the most popular and give rise to the deep learning process when they have more than three layers.

One of the main challenges of the algorithms is to homogenize the data so that they can be analyzed and create, from them, an analysis model that looks for patterns, classification and makes predictions. The learning model for these algorithms is periodic training, and to reinforce this learning, it is necessary to add more data or have more human intervention.

The great advantage of artificial intelligence is that machines can process data in a way that is far superior to that of the human brain, allowing them to find patterns that are not obvious to our intellect. The disadvantage, on the other hand, is the lack of semantics to understand words in their context and situation, hence ethical problems arise in the use of artificial intelligence algorithms.

Published in PhD. Mohamed El Masry Badran / Actualidad Económica on January 16, 2022

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