It’s hard to say till when the people‘s thoughts have been occupied by Artificial Intelligence. One of the first famous references to AI in the world literature was far away in 1939 in a novel Robbie by Isaac Asimov. For several centuries the humanity has already been captured with an idea to create robots with human qualities to be our partners. Mostly, we perceive AI as robotics, which is actually wrong. What exactly the notion AI includes and how business can benefit from it, we will tell you in this article.
So what is Artificial Intelligence?
As mentioned above, the idea is not new and the term was coined back in 1956 by the professor John Mccarthy. A group of scientists started working together to figure out if a machine could learn like a child, using experience, develop formal reasoning and improve itself. And all these started more than 60 years ago.
In basic terms, AI is a broad area of computer science that can create machines and software seem like they have human intelligence and improve themselves. Robot Sophia, who was talking to journalists on GMB is an example how most of the people imagine AI, but, again, it’s not just about robots and not all the examples of AI are so intelligent. A robot is nothing more than just a shell to live in technologies. So stop thinking of AI as of a robot only. You are not going to meet a Terminator in the street, at least not soon) But AI is what we have been using for some time without not always realizing that it is AI.
For example, when a self-driven car has a program that does not just drives itself obeying traffic rules, but it also learns to deal with road-rage is an example of AI. Virtual assistants as Siri, Cortana, Alexa have AI with machine learning ability, which lets them give you an answer to almost any question you ask them, like what is the pi character or where is the nearest cafe.
To resemble human behavior machines study from experience as toddlers do, they repeat actions many times and store terabytes of info to create a truly effective algorithm to solve a certain problem. This is possible thank to artificial neural network, an algorithm and programming code, which is created on the principles of human brain neural network.
Today, software on the basis of AI can recognize objects better and faster than humans, translate from many languages in real-time, play logical games and many other things. Thank to not getting tired, depressed, distracted, being faster and dealing excellently with big data, AI-based technologies are changing the labor market and industries themselves as the industrial revolution used to do it.
Categories of Artificial Intelligence
If a software or a kind of a robot has AI features, it doesn’t mean that it’s super genius yet. Here are three types of AI we may use, according to their complexity:
#1 ANI – Artificial Narrow Intelligence. You can play chess with a computer or ask a bot to tell you the weather, but the same program will not tell you where is the nearest gas station. Such software is created to solve specific kinds of tasks only, but they do it extremely well.
#2 AGI – Artificial general intelligence is a much more sophisticated type and is very similar to our brain. It can make abstract conclusions and decisions on its basis, can sort out priorities in a workload, explain problems, accumulate experience and study from it independently.
#3 ASI – Artificial Superintelligence. Well, briefly speaking, it’s a mega-brain, a super software, which has powers that human brain can never have in any kind of sphere, including inventing things, from a piece of art to a machine. This is what we don’t have yet, but many scientists predict that we can get it within our lifetime.
ANI as a part of our life
Why do you see certain ads when reading the timeline on Facebook or use a service for translation from foreign languages? Google, Facebook, and others analyze your interests and queries and give you what you see on the basis of their analysis.
The most widespread examples of ANI are:
- when you use translators like Google translate;
- when you play the stock market, the software can make decisions depending on some indicators, e.g. buy or sell currency depending on its rates;
- when you play a computer game with a virtual partner;
- when you get recommendations from apps like Pandora or from a bot in a shopping app;
- when you ask your weather bot to tell you about the weather or use any kind of bot like to find a cafe and book a table, ask for your size of shoes in an internet shop or do some analytics on your website.
ANI can be highly helpful in e-commerce, entertainment, and literary speaking in any kind of industry. It’s not harmful to the humanity. The worse that can happen because of it is certain process may crash or a mistake in some calculations may occur. The improvement of ANI contributes into the development of AGI.
Industries to be influenced with AI
As mechanisms and electricity have changed the world more than a century ago, AI influences us immensely today. The last several years the world has produced about of 90% of the information we have ever had before and AI technologies, like machine learning and recognition, assist us to manage this data, automate and optimize loads of processes.
Logistics and traveling
We guess everybody has already heard about self-driven cars, vehicles, underground trains, etc. They are not common for us yet, but they are promised to be that in about 20 years. A lot of them are being tested now to be safe and sustainable. Most of the scientists say that these can make transportation even safer as it excludes the human factor. At Cleveroad, we are familiar with smart car technologies and app development for this sphere of AI.
Routines
Here we speak about chores that we face in our everyday life like ordering and delivering things, cleaning, security and so on. Of course, there are autonomous vacuum cleaners already, but they can accomplish one task only. Scientists are working on robots-assistants who can do many things about the house, even feed your pet. Smart home systems, which can control electricity, heating, safety are already here but they promise to be even smarter and adapt to the tenants’ habits and desires.
Medical service
Devices and software with AI features can contribute greatly to the healthcare and wellness industry. Among them are robots which can perform operations, software that can test the person’s physical condition, help doctors make a diagnosis faster and better, analyze the story of the patient’s diseases and many others. What is also very valuable with AI in medicine, it gives an opportunity for ill and disabled people track their condition and understand if they need an urgent help or even perform some manipulations which can save their lives. For now, these technologies are not very trusted, but things are getting better as this sphere improves and becomes more common.
Education
Education is available to people today as it was never before. Software which helps to study is greatly in demand. Various types of educational bots, like for studying foreign languages, math, computer science and others are booming today. Bots and AI in education make the process more interactive and available at any time and in any place. Also, the possibility to have practice is not possible if you study alone with textbooks.
Alongside with the influence on existing industries, the burst of AI will create new professions connected with AI software development, designing and engineering different kinds of robots and implementing AI technologies into various industries.
Drawbacks of Artificial Intelligence
When we think about AI we mostly imagine how we can benefit from it. But isn’t it smart to think about the technologies’ downsides too? Among the biggest problems in this list is the impact on the labor market. Speaking of self-driven trucks, 300,000 people may lose their jobs in the USA during next 25 years. And there will be the similar influence in many industries. So, the society has to think of new professions and social support to these people. These issues were discussed on the AI conference which took place in California in February this year.
Many people are opposed to the AI development and claim that machines and computers are capturing the world. This is a question to countries’ governments and their policy, how they solve the problems in the educational sphere to help people stay up to date and be in demand as professionals. And surely it’s a question to everyone of us, what we do with the free time which technologies give us today.
Another issue is psychological problems and fears that people may have facing with intelligent machines and software. Especially older generations will have to adapt to innovations and study how to deal with them.
We can’t stop the progress, we can only control it and make it human. It’s already impossible to imagine that we can’t have the influence of Artificial Intelligence. It can help us make the world a better place and improve ourselves, become better humans, better entrepreneurs and create new values. It’s all in our hands, isn’t it?
