Artificial Intelligence: What is all the buzz about?
The world of AI has been evolving exponentially in the 21st century. It has become a skill that every tech geek wants to brag about. The very idea of artificial intelligence took birth from science fictions from the first half of the 19th century. By the end of it, we had a bunch of globally diverse minds working their minds on the concept of AI.
Today, while technology is still in its infancy, the field of Artificial Intelligence has shown significant progress. It has been an in-demand sector for technical jobs and is believed to transform the global economy. Hence, there has been an unavoidable urge to learn about AI from job seekers to the employed class.
Everyone out there is on a lookout for a good artificial intelligence tutorial to brush up on their AI skills. Well, we are about to dive into the world of AI and learn about artificial intelligence basics for beginners in the simplest ways possible.
Artificial Intelligence: What is it?
The simpler definition of AI is that it’s the ability of the machines to do things intelligently to reduce or eliminate human efforts. This ability is given by the use of programming tools and techniques. It is like a baby growing into an adult that is, becoming intelligent to do things on its own.
Technologically, AI involves a lot of classification, analysis and prediction to generate results. But, AI is much more than that. It involves learning from the date, acting on it and improving over time.
It won’t be surprising if you assume that AI is just like regular programming. Well, it is not. Regular programs are bound to operate on confined and defined scenarios. AI knows no bounds. In AI, a program trained for a particular task explores other scenarios to improve on its own. It unleashes itself into various scenarios, learns, improves, and tries to figure out what to do when met with unknown situations.
To understand this better, consider MS PowerPoint and Google Assistant. Now, the former is a regular application software while the latter is an AI-based software. We all know what each of them does. While MS PowerPoint is confined to do a set of tasks, Assistant on the other hand has been constantly improving in the tasks it does and the number of things it can do.
We all can agree on how it has made life so much simpler.
While AI boasts flexible intelligence, it has some strict requirements. To incorporate Artificial Intelligence, we need humongous amounts of data. AI algorithms are thus trained over datasets to make predictions by identifying patterns.
They recommend actions based on these predictions, just like a human would, but, only faster and better.
Artificial Intelligence: The Goals
Here are some goals we try to achieve with the use of AI technology:
- Knowledge Representation: AI research is mainly inclined towards knowledge representation. This helps in better understanding the problems and making better strategies.
- Planning: AI helps in gaining insights into the current scenarios to help make better strategies for the future.
- Learning: Learning or Machine Learning is an important aspect of Artificial Intelligence. Learning helps AI models to train themselves better.
- Social Intelligence: This is a human capacity to understand others and to act rational or emotional in relation to others. This is one important goal AI tries to achieve.
- Problem Solving: This is the ultimate goal. Problem-solving is the goal of every program. In AI, the goal is to solve the problem and solve it better.
All these goals ultimately try to point to a world of highly intelligent technology and faster problem-solving.
So, what are these technologies that are based on AI?
Artificial Intelligence: Applications
AI has taken over today’s world with so many applications. Let us learn about some of the main applications or the so-called gifts of AI:
- Agriculture: AI has been used in the agricultural sector to improve the yield through better research. Predictive analysis and Agricultural Robots are some of the examples.
- Cyber security: AI is used by companies to sort data according to their risk factor i.e., high risk or low-risk data. This information helps companies to better protect their data.
- Education: AI tutors have been developed to provide students with one-on-one help. The main goal was to reduce stress or anxiety caused by human tutors.
- Health: AI has been assisting doctors in better treatment of diseases for a long while now.
- Finance: The world of finance has long benefitted from the use of AI. Banks use AI to organise operations. The trading market is heavily reliant on complex AI systems to make decisions on trading.
AI looks like a fairyland, but it is important to understand that it has some disadvantages too.
Artificial Intelligence: The Drawbacks
- A pricey affair: While AI is a better route for problem-solving, it is not cheaper to incorporate AI-based models. The cost of operations will be pushed significantly.
- High Potential for misuse: AI has great power and potential to achieve unbelievable feats. While it’s a good thing, on one hand, it only increases the risk of damage that can be caused by its misuse on the other hand.
- Scarcity of Talent: There is a significant gap in the number of jobs available in the AI field and the amount of skilled workforce in the team. This is because AI is still in its initial stages and a majority of the workforce is yet to migrate into it.
- High dependency: AI has made life much simpler and thus we humans have become highly dependent on it. While it makes problem-solving easier and faster, we are losing our interest to learn to do things on our own.
AI has made a lot of advancements but it is still in a ‘faraway land’ from human intelligence. But, the tech world is a no surprise zone. Anything can happen. We have reached the end of the AI tutorial for beginners.
