How a layman understands Artificial Intelligence
The world has entered the third decade of the 21st century. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer a term that is unfamiliar to us. Governments, Global Organizations, Multi National Companies are constantly working in this area, trying to develop AI based systems and technologies. This subject typically involves technical aspects that a common man finds difficult to understand. Let’s discuss AI in layman’s terms.
Can machine outsmart man?
Chess, a board game; you really have to use your brains to play this game, and that’s a fact. You must have heard of Garry Kasparov. Garry Kasparov is a Russian chess grandmaster and he is considered to be one of the greatest chess players of all time. And, I must say, that Kasparov, during his best years, knew the game better than any other human being in the entire world. I said ‘human being’, because something happened in 1997 that Kasparov had never imagined. A machine, not a human being, defeated the world champion. This machine was a computer ‘Deep Blue’ which had been developed by IBM. Deep Blue was a machine, but having said that, it played the game of Chess unlike a computer; the way it was making its moves during the game, it seemed as if Kasparov was playing against a real human being.
‘Go’ is a popular board game in the countries like China, Japan and Korea. The rules of this game are very simple; but when it comes to making a move, there are numerous possibilities to consider. Unlike Chess, we can’t really calculate all the possibilities before making a particular move. At the end of the game, the player who controls more territory than the opponent wins the game. Of course, a player needs skill, strategy and experience to win this game, also, intuition and creativity, something that we can only expect from a human brain, and we do not expect a machine to show this sort of behavior. For years, ‘Go’ was considered beyond the reach of even the most sophisticated computer programs. However, Google developed a computer program AlphaGo which was capable of playing this game. The South Korean Go champion Lee Sedol played against AlphaGo in 2016. The same thing happened to Lee Sedol—he lost the game. Once again a machine beat the human mind.
Now, there are some questions that naturally arise. For example, do the incidents that occurred to Kasparov and Sedol indicate that a machine has a better understanding of anything than a human does? Can a machine learn from experiences? Can it make the decision on its own in a particular situation? Are computers already smarter than humans? Well, the answer to all these questions is increasingly complex.
Human Intelligence & Artificial Intelligence
One more question, and that’s a very basic one — what is intelligence? We always want to know why something is important, why something happens, how it happens and how it works. We show curiosity about everything. We ask questions. We think rationally and logically. We imagine. We communicate in different languages. We continuously learn from our experiences. We use our knowledge to control and change our environment. We adapt to new situations. We make wise decisions in unforeseen circumstances. Well, these are some of the traits that make human beings unique; that make us different from any other species; these are the traits that no other creature on this planet can match. That is something we call intelligence, or, more precisely, natural human intelligence.
Just imagine a machine or a system with similar characteristics, like ability to understand the language we speak and communicate back to us in a way we can understand, ability to identify different objects and pictures, to critically analyze data and solve problems, to make sensible decisions in unknown situations—this is something we call AI; Artificial Intelligence or Machine Intelligence. An AI is a human-made system, a machine that works almost like a human, or, in other words, AI is a system with an intelligence which, in a way, is near to human intelligence.
Is AI different from computer?
There is something important to understand. Being able to calculate numbers does not mean intelligence, there is much more to it. It is necessary to know the difference between AI and a calculator or a computer. A computer does only what it is programmed to do. It is not possible for a computer to do something beyond the limits of its program. On the other hand, AI pushes the limits and works beyond the limits of what an ordinary computer can do. AI continues to process information obtained from previous experiences and makes decision accordingly—just like a human being.
Do we have AI in any form?
Have we succeeded in achieving AI in any form? Can Google be an answer to this question? The Search Engine Google helps us find the information we are looking for by making suggestions when we type something in its search bar. It actually makes these suggestions on the basis of the information we previously searched for on the internet. This is perhaps an example of AI in its simplest form.
Google Assistant seems to have Artificial Intelligence. It works as a virtual assistant, which is primarily available on mobile phones and smart home devices. It can understand the language we speak and can respond by speaking the same language. It can translate one language into another. It can perform various tasks, such as, working as a search engine, making phone call, sending text, scheduling events and alarms, giving weather report, changing the settings on the user’s device etc. You can use Google Assistant to even make payments with your voice.
Google Lens is an image recognition technology that brings up relevant information about the objects it identifies using visual analysis. You don’t have to type what you are looking for. For example, you like an item of clothing, just take a photo, and you will find similar brands or products and where to buy them; or you like a book, take a photo of the book, you will get summary and read reviews; or let us suppose, you are a student and you are stuck on a problem, just take a photo and you can quickly find explainers, videos, and results from the web for physics, chemistry, math, and more. Take photos and you can identify plants and animals. Google Lens can also translate images of text.
Alexa, developed by Amazon, is another example of a virtual assistant. It is capable of voice interaction, music playback, making to-do lists, setting alarms, streaming podcasts, playing audiobooks, and providing weather, traffic, sports, and other real-time information, such as news. Alexa can also control several smart devices using itself as a home automation system.
How AI works in Autopilot Car
The next example is well worth mentioning—the Autopilot Cars manufactured by Tesla. In fact, Tesla has shown how the AI technology can be used to enable a car to drive on its own.
Tesla Autopilot cars constantly interpret images from their sensors and machine vision cameras, and then use this information to make decisions about what to do next. These Cars actually use Artificial Intelligence to understand and anticipate the next movements of other cars, pedestrians, cyclists, etc. This data helps them plan their moves in a split second, and decide what to do from moment to moment, e.g. should the autopilot car stay in the current lane, or change lanes? Should it overtake the other car ahead of it, or stay where it is? When should it brake or accelerate?
In order to make cars fully autonomous, Tesla has to collect the right data to feed their AI Systems / to train their AI Systems. Tesla obtains all this data from its existing customer base—hundreds of thousands of Tesla vehicles that are currently on roads. Internal and external sensors monitor what Tesla cars are doing in all kinds of situations; these sensors even collect data on driver’s behavior—how they react in different situations. The Artificial Intelligence used in Tesla Autopilot Cars learns from the decisions, reactions, and movements of millions of actual drivers around the world.
AI Chatbot & Generative AI
AI Chatbot. What is a Chatbot ?
Think of it like an Internet Search Engine although it works differently. To the user it is a textbox where you type questions. Chatbots have been around for a while, but they suddenly got a lot better because of a new technology called Generative AI.
Generative AI is Artificial Intelligence that could generate new content rather than simply analyzing or acting on exiting data. This technology involves giving lots of examples of images or text to a Machine Learning system and it then learns to generate its own. Chatbots are trained on massive amounts of text data from the Internet.
Chat GPT
Chat GPT, an AI Chatbot—you may have heard of it. GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. It is the most recent example that tops the list of AI tools. What Chat GPT has achieved in the last couple of years is just remarkable. It has been developed by a research lab called Open AI. This technology is revolutionary, that puts AI in the hands of the masses.
Chatting with this bot is pretty much like talking to a human. Chat GPT automatically answers questions based on written prompts. It interacts in a conversational way. Unlike most chatbots, Chat GPT remembers previous prompts given to it in the same conversation.
Chat GPT is versatile. It can write computer programs and answer test questions. In fact, its ability to write essays, code, and do Maths with greater accuracy and consistency is almost as significant as the creation of the integrated circuit, the personal computer, the web browser or the smart phone. Interestingly, Chat GPT gets better with more usage. It is pre-trained by human developers initially and then prepared to learn for itself as more and more queries are posed by users to it.
Chap GPT has millions of users. Companies have started using it for writing code, for copywriting and content creation, for customer support, for documentation …..
Will AI take over jobs?
Will AI tools or AI systems replace us in the workforce? Will they take our job? It is a question that we must seriously consider. Artificial Intelligence is creating a lot of uncertainty and fear. Economists predict that such technology could bring significant disruption to the labor market. They say that millions of full time jobs around the world are set to get automated. With workers replaced by AI systems, a vast majority of workers will have at least part of their jobs automated by GPT models.
AI is coming for everyone it seems. At least for the white-collar workers—those who work from office settings, they are the ones at risk. They are more exposed to be replaced by AI tools like Chat GPT. Also people in the tech sector—those who code, those who are in the customer service sector, artists, writers, teachers, lawyers, traders, journalists, the list goes on.
What AI can’t do
The capacity of human mind seems quite limited compared with AI. The Artificial Intelligence, connected to the internet or a global network, is able to process massive amounts of data relentlessly at great speed within seconds.
However, there are some distinguishing qualities that humans possess and it is extremely unlikely that AI will ever have such attributes. Humans have mind; they know that they are humans, and they are aware of their existence. They are full of emotions and they experience feelings, like love, fear or anger. Humans, of course, think, imagine and dream, they create ideas and form opinions, they write poetry and stories.
Maybe, at some point in the distant future, if we could develop sort of mind in a machine, it would be the peak of Artificial Intelligence. Perhaps such a ‘Self Aware System’ would somehow think and act like a human being.
Can a machine learn like a human being?
Well, that’s an interesting question and a bit too complicated to explain as well. A human child tends to show higher cognitive ability compared with a machine or a computer. Once a human child, for example, sees the image of an Apple, he/she will easily recognize the real Apple. But it is doubtful whether a machine will be able to do that so easily without making an error. And again, it’s easy for a human child to differentiate between cat and dog, but it may be difficult for a machine to do so.
How Hollywood thinks about AI
We find some imaginary characters, or rather, machines in few Hollywood movies based on science fiction, which may be cited as possible examples of AI. But these systems appear to be so incredibly efficient that developing the AI of such level is something which is beyond the capacity of humans of the present age.
Like the movie series ‘Iron Man’; Tony Stark creates an AI, called JARVIS (Just A Rather Very Intelligent System) that works as his virtual assistant. It runs and takes care of all the internal systems of Stark’s buildings and the Iron Man suits. It talks to Stark like a human does, makes suggestions, and also warns him of the coming danger.
In the movie ‘I, Robot’, the robot Sonny has the body of a machine and the mind of a human; that thinks, feels and even dreams like a human being.
Or the Skynet system in the ‘Terminator’ series, that gains self-awareness, goes rogue, and poses a serious threat to human existence.
Each of these characters is a product of our imagination. An imagination, which is based on reason and logic. Though these movie characters seem almost impossible to exist, they could somehow lead to the future AI systems.
Now, concluding with few more points—Changes that AI has brought about in people’s lives are just the beginning. Much more is to come, and we have no idea what the future holds. AI is certain to happen. This is something inevitable. So, we need to understand how AI works. We need to learn to work with AI, to live with AI.
Shubhra Atreya
Content Writer
IT SVSU