Curious about Artificial Intelligence? Start here …

Part 1 of a Series of 7

What is AI exactly? What does it mean?

There are lots of definitions. Here is one I like from Larry Page, who co-founded Google:

“Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the web. It would understand exactly what you wanted and it would give you the right thing … and that is basically what we’re working on.” 

Artificial intelligence is the meeting point of computing, neuroscience, statistics and engineering. In practice, it involves the development of machines (physical and virtual) to do things that are usually done by people. A machine is considered to have artificial intelligence if it does something that we would normally think of as intelligent in humans.

That covers quite a wide range of activities, but how a machine does it is not really the issue (there are various techniques, just as there are various types of biological intelligence). An artificial intelligence has to emulate a human being by thinking, sensing, choosing, learning or deciding for itself.

AI includes such a wide range of disciplines that is has been described as a 'suitcase'. In other words, there are many different contents when you open the lid.

Recipes for Innovation

It is in the clever combination of these various branches of AI that real world innovations are created. For example, autonomous cars use vision to sense their environment, natural language processing to understand road signs and machine learning to decide how to react to other cars and people.

Here are some real world examples:

Google Translate, the amazing app that converts text, voice or photos in 103 languages

Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant in phones, TVs etc. Have you met her yet?

PredPol, is bringing scifi movie Minority Report to life by predicting crimes before they happen

AlphaGo Zero, the world champion at board game Go, which taught itself to play in 3 days

Spotify, the music service that seems to know what mood you’re in better than you do!

Why now?

By this definition, AI can range from smart fridges to killer robots, with applications limited only by human ingenuity*. The reason it has become such a hot topic in the past few years is that computing power is greater and more affordable than ever before, and the internet has enabled the accumulation of vast volumes of data. So, enterprising technologists are putting these factors together and creating technologies that are more than the sum of their parts.

* By the way, please don’t worry about evil robots taking over the world. Although we now have machines that can do one or two things very well, building an artificial superintelligence (also known as ‘the singularity’) that does everything at least as well as humans is far beyond anything possible today. Even something approaching self awareness is decades away.

Still not quite convinced? Watch this energising 2-minute video by futurist Jason Silva:

Please follow me if you would like to read more of this series: Why should I be interested in AI?