Exploring the World of Artificial Intelligence: A Beginner’s Guide

“I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted”

— Alan Turing, 1947 (Father of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence)

In 1950, Alan Turing published an article titled, Computing Machinery and Intelligence and stated the question, “I propose to consider the question, can a machine think?” He also argued that there is no convincing argument that machines cannot think intelligently like humans and that different approaches can be taken to advance machine intelligence.

Over the years, after the paper was first published, there has been trememdous progress in the field of intelligent machines, so much so that now terms like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning no longer sound like something coming out of science fiction, but is something we use it in our every day lives. 

Artificial Intelligence or AI as is commonly known is an exciting field in Computer Science, which focuses on making machine act in an intelligent way. At the base of Artificial Intelligence are algorithms that tries to percieve things in a similar fashion a human would do and with each iteration, the aim is to make the algorithm better so that the output is close to how we humans would have done.

Types of AI

Although the different types of Artificial Intelligence systems have a common goal of achieving human like intelligence, they can be divided into the following types,

Narrow AI

An Artificial Intelligence system is called a Narrow AI, when the system is running a  highly specialized learning algorithm such that it is designed to perform only a single task, and any knowledge it gains while performing that task is not used for any other tasks.

Some of the common examples of Narrow AI are,

1. Personal assistants such as Siri, Google Assistant etc.
2. Disease detection AI programs.
3. AI programs designed for specific security use case such as facial recognition etc.

General AI

General AI or Artificial General Intelligence as is commonly known, is a type of AI system that therotically be able to mimmic human intelligence and perform any tasks that a human can do. While it is not yet ready, several companies are working on making it a reality. Unlike Narrow AI which is designed to perform only a certain type of task, General AI therotically should be able to do any task and apply learnings to newer tasks it will perform just as we humans do. One of the important test that a General AI needs to consistently pass to be able to be called General AI is the Turing test.

Although there is no AI system that can be confidently called as General AI, there are few which are being worked upon to achive this, some of which are,

1. Self driving cars such as Tesla Autopilot
2. Conversational AI programs such as ChatGPT

Super AI

Super AI or Artificial Super Intelligence as is also know, is the type of AI commonly seen in Science Fiction movies, that is capable of surpassing human intelligence by having cognitive and thinking skills of it’s own. Such type of AI systems would be th emost advanced, powerful and intelligent type of AI system that will be much more intelligent that any human has ever been. Such systems will be able to understand and interpret things that humans has not yet discovered or come across.

Benefits and Risks of AI

Benefits

1. Systems integrated with AI will enhance human productivity by automating the repetitive tasks freeing up time to take on more creative ventures.
2. AI based systems can help reduce facilitate quick decision making by analyzing large amount of data and highlighting patterns and insights for the decision makers.
3. AI based digitial assistants such as Siri, Google Assistants are used by millions daily to make day to day life easier.
4. Medical applications of AI are still in development phase, but once ready, it will be able to directly help health practitioners in analyzing patient data and highlighting any emerging risk even before it has become life threatening.
5. AI based systems are helping scientists solve complex problems furthering human understanding and research.

Risks

1. AI based systems can sometimes show bias since they are trained on the publicly available resources, work is going on to avoid the bias.
2. Several companies and people have raised privacy concerns about the collection and use of their data to train AI models.
3. With AI systems still in the evolving phase, there is a security risks of AI not understanding the motto of the users and divelging sensitive information to bad actors.
4. People are also worried about becoming dependent on AI and such systems taking away their jobs.