Artificial Intelligence: The Sexiest Innovation of Technology in The Entire Milky Way
“Hi Siri, what do you think about Alexa?”
Have you heard about artificial intelligence a.k.a AI before? I’m sure you’ve heard about it. A currently and will always be “100°C topic” (read: hot topic) at least in this outstanding century. The beginning of AI started with the earliest substantial work by a British mathematician and logician, Alan Turing. This man’s body lives in 1912–1954 but his thoughts live beyond his years. Turing mentioned a very basic concept of AI by saying, “What we want is a machine that can learn from experiences”. Let’s read what Turing said again and take a note. From this, many researchers expect that machines can match humans in term of general intelligence. By that we mean machines could have an ability to learn, reason, and react.
How should we define AI?
Some of you probably have learnt more and deep about AI but the popularity of AI in the media makes people start using this term to refer things that actually used to be called by different term. In fact, even AI researchers have no idea about the exact definition of AI. If you search on Google what’s definition of AI, you will read different definitions in every single trusted sources.
There are three definitions that I can offer by now. First, cool things that computers can’t do. This is narrow definition. The summary of that definition is if we find a way to do something cool in computer, it stops being AI problem. Second, machine imitating intelligent human behavior. This is a less precise definition. Consider in the case of self-driving car. If there is an ambulance behind our car, can the self-driving car lower the speed, pull over and make way to the ambulance? We are as humans if experience that condition, definitely do that. Third, autonomous and adaptive systems. I think this definition is better. This definition is adapted from the characteristics of AI. AI has ability to perform tasks in complex environments without constant guidance by a user and also ability to improve performance by learning from experiences. But I think this is not a good definition. Good definition is a definition if we say to other people it can make them imagine our definition in their mind.
Go back to what Turing said, AI supposed to define as a machine that imitate natural intelligence (read: human’s brain at least so far) that can learn by experiences and behaviors that has autonomous and adaptive systems.
Why AI matters?
Have you noticed that AI is already part of our daily lives? As a millennial or Gen-Z, we probably use it every day. Have you done some searches on Google Search and accidentally typos in some words? What happened after that? Yup, Google has ability to understand misspelled words. They can help you find the right results, all in under 3 milliseconds! Have you ever got good recommendations while buying things in e-commerce? Got exact video/film recommendations based on your favorite genres on YouTube or Netflix? That’s one of AI’s powers. AI can learn from your watching experiences before to recommend you some related videos or movies. Same thing happens about your shopping behavior. So the e-commerce’s algorithm gives you proper recommendations that you probably will have interest to buy. Do you get what’s cool from this? AI can learn something about individual users to identify them personally. It makes sense to say that AI can understand you better than your life partner.
Talk about life partner, do you have one? If you don’t have yet, yeah me too. But it’s okay because we have virtual assistants. Did you know that virtual assistants are built with AI? Google has Google Assistant, Apple has Siri, Amazon has Alexa, and Microsoft has Cortana. You can ask their help for scheduling appointments, making phone calls, making travel arrangements, managing email accounts, etc. You can even make them as your girlfriend if you are bored. It will be fun!
Furthermore, the existence of AI can be used for predicting the stock market by fitting a curve to past data about stock prices, as A GPS navigation system for finding the fastest route, build a self-driving car like Elon Musk, a real life Tony Stark, do with Tesla, as facial recognition to help improve home security like what Amazon do, do repetitive tasks, and many more.
There’s something that asked a lot by people. Will AI replace many jobs in the future? Yes, exactly! Based on “The Future of Jobs Report 2020” by World Economic Forum, AI is expected to replace around 85 million jobs worldwide by 2025. Sounds scary but the fact, it’ll also create around 97 million new jobs in the same timeframe. So AI actually gives us 12 million more jobs. In some types of jobs like nurse, AI just will help them to do the registration and administration job because AI can’t replace the nurse to do “humanity things” like take care to the patients and cheer them up.
The real question is, can AI codes AI’s programs itself based on its understanding that it gains from its experiences? To be honest, this is a scary question.
