A Gentle Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

Think of a machine that is more intelligent than human in many ways. It is a fast learner, quick thinker, creative and has a better decision-making ability. Or it may have the ability to empathize with you and understand your feelings. Artificial intelligence applications are here to make these things possible for you and who knows you might witness these features implemented in the near future.

Artificial Intelligence will continue to be at the top of the hype cycle in 2018. Artificial intelligence is getting more and more practical implications, automating many jobs and collaborating with other technologies to improve the business outlook. Artificial intelligence has introduced a massive revolution in almost every industry. It is also said that the in the fourth industrial revolution, artificial intelligence is going to play a major role.

Let us first discuss something about artificial intelligence.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence is the branch of computer science that deals with the creation and study of computer programs and machines that have the ability to reason, perceive, take a decision and solve problems. Artificial intelligence gives the thinking ability to the machines. Thus artificial intelligence machines can perform tasks that would otherwise require human intelligence.

Artificial intelligence is of two types- Narrow or weak AI and Strong AI.

Narrow AI: Narrow or weak AI is the phenomena in which machines are programmed to perform some specific task only. Narrow AI machines are not that intelligent; as they can perform single specific tas only.

Strong AI: Strong AI, on the other hand, is the phenomena in which machines are built that can actually simulate the human intelligence. These machines can adapt themselves to the environment and various types of inputs. These can react differently to different situations.

Machine learning and deep learning are two sub-branches of artificial intelligence. Let us define them too in brief.

Machine Learning

Machine learning is the sub-branch of artificial intelligence. Machine learning is the ability of machines to learn on their own. Machine learning gives the ability of reasoning, decision making, problem-solving to the machines. Artificial intelligence algorithms are enabling machines to learn from their past experience. Machine learning platforms are mainly used in prediction systems as well as in the classification of products. All the technology giants like Google, Microsoft, Facebook are making use of machine learning.

Deep Learning

Deep Learning is the sub-branch of machine learning. Deep learning is inspired by the working of the human brain. The human brain consists of billions of layers of neural networks providing the capability of learning and decision making. Deep Learning imitates the human brain neural network by building artificial neural networks. Deep learning networks give the thinking ability to machines by providing weight and biasing to the input variables.

Advantages of Artificial intelligence

There are numerous advantages of using artificial intelligent machines. Artificial intelligence service has found its application in many industries due to its advantages. Some of the advantages of artificial intelligence are:

• Artificial intelligence machines reduce the error in the operations. They are highly accurate and have a high degree of precision.

• Robotics and artificial intelligence machines have helped in the exploration of gold mines, crude oils, and oceans. As artificial intelligence machines can work in any environment, exploration becomes easier.

• Artificial intelligence machines reduce the risk factor as they can perform tasks that involve risk to the lives of humans. Like working at dizzy heights and working with sharp-edged tools etc.

• Artificial intelligence is good digital assistants also. They can interact with the user in the form of text, speech or biometrics. They can perform simple tasks that a human assistant would do.

• Machines do not require breaks as they do not get tired. Machines can perform continuously for a long time without getting bored.

Besides having so many advantages, artificial intelligence has several limitations also.

Limitations of Artificial intelligence

Creation of artificial intelligence requires a lot of research and budget. Also, updating and maintenance of AI machines require huge costs.

Artificial intelligence can never match the thinking ability of humans.

Artificial intelligence machines are performing repetitive and routine tasks better than humans. This will lead to a reduction of jobs.

On the basis of operations, artificial intelligence machines are of the following four types:

1.Reactive Machines AI

2.Limited Memory AI

3.Theory of Mind AI

4.Self Awareness AI

1.Reactive Machines AI

Reactive machines AI is the most basic type of AI machines. These machines are purely reactive. They do not have the ability to store data as it does not have memories. Also, it cannot learn from the past experience. The classic example of a reactive machine is the Deep Blue- IBM’s chess-playing supercomputer which defeated the grandmaster at that time Garry Kasparov in 1990’s.

Deep Blue was trained with the rules of the Chess and how each piece moves. It can only analyze the current situation. Its moves were dependent on the current positions of its pieces as well as opponent’s pieces. This type of intelligence is not based on the memory and cannot learn from past experience.

2.Limited Memory AI

These type of AI machines can have the memory but the memory is limited. Self-driving Cars is the perfect example of limited memory AI. Artificial intelligence as a service has helped in the development of limited memory AI. Self-driving cars have to memorize the directions, observe other cars, identifying distractions and objects in the path etc. But this information no permanently stored in the memory. So, it cannot contribute to the experience of the car, unlike humans who can gain experience over the time.

3.Theory of Mind

Theory of mind is a very advanced technology. These are the next level machines that are more advanced. These machines have memories and they can behave and talk like humans, roam the streets. They have the capability to form the society like we do. They have the ability to understand people, objects, and other living creatures.

4.Self-Awareness AI

These type of AI machines are self- aware. They are clear about what they want. They are clear about their internal state and also are able to predict the feelings of others also. They have a sense of understanding also. They can empathize and make a relation with the humans. But we are far away from creating these type of machines. Our main focus should be on the more intelligent machines that can learn from past behavior.

Conclusion

In this articles, we discussed the artificial intelligence. The concept of artificial intelligence is vast. It also includes many other technologies like machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing. We will be discussing these technologies in a separate article. Artificial intelligence applications have helped in revolutionizing the mankind. Webtunix AI is an artificial intelligence software company that is providing solutions in AI and machine learning to its clients.