Just Like Child’s Play
The Basics Of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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Just as electricity transformed almost everything 100 years ago, today I actually have a hard time thinking of an industry that I don’t think AI will transform in the next several years,” — Andrew Ng-Founder, Coursera
Perhaps, Artificial Intelligence will go down in history as one of the most misunderstood technologies of our time. Hearing Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg talk about it reminds me of the great rivalry between Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. At the beginning of any profound technological change, the ideas of legends are like an imperfect vision of the future. That is what AI is today.
On one hand, there are people predicting machines taking over humanity. On the other, there are people who do not know AI exists because they literally live in a dark world-a world without electricity.
However, what is true is that humans are walking factories of data generating exabytes of inputs for machines (through sensors and microchips). This data is already being used, to improve AI algorithms, by tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Apple to search for places, to recognize faces and to help using virtual assistants such as Siri.Thus, AI is advancing using machine learning.
What nobody knows for certain is if and when machines will reach superhuman intelligence.
While there is no pragmatic reason to think about evil machines as a near probability, it is one of the outcomes. At the end, what is certain is that we have to keep abreast of advances in the field of AI. That is the goal of this article- to layout the basics of AI, explain the state of the art today and provide helpful resources for beginners to engage with AI.
Does Curiosity Always Kill The Cat?
Humans are curious animals. Our knowledge has been codified as science. Much of that knowledge and it’s application as technology later is an attempt to recreate the world around us. When we gazed upon the pyramids, we had a desire to recreate the wonders created by our ancestors. That quest has never really taken a…
