WHAT IS THIS THING AI?

Artificial intelligence (an intro)

Hello there! Due to public demand I’m going to try and dive you into this beautiful yet mysterious world of AI. Now, I know you have already heard about AI. AI here AI there, AI everywhere but maybe, I said maybe have no idea of what this Ai is! Some can only think of artificial insemination which is correct anyway but not according to this of AI that I’m presenting here.

My AI is artificial intelligence. Let us not rush, let’s go word by word. Intelligence that is artificially created. There is the natural intelligence and also, there is this version that can be made by human. Now to give it a more meaningful meaning, it’s also referred to as computational intelligence. We already know what intelligence is: the ability to comprehend and learn. So, it is the ability to comprehend and learn that is human made for the computers.

So when I talk of computational intelligence, I am basically talking of giving the computers the ability to learn and understand things the same way you do. You see, as a human being you didn’t come already knowing what you do know, you learnt and that why we go to school. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not proposing we open a school for computers where they’ll be attending classes like your kids, brothers and or sisters, no! I’m talking about the basic things that we do that computers can’t do. For example, walking, identifying objects, shapes, colors, faces, telling this apart. These activities seem completely easy for you as a human to perform but trust me there are hectic, hard, troubling and a huge task for the computer. In contrary, the computer does those things that are hard for us to perform, things like finding the finding the square root of 1138528739460291 among others.

As you might have noticed, the major difference between you and the computer is that it was programmed to do all it does and you learnt. This means you are flexible and can add knowledge but the computer cannot. It is rigid, fixed, and dumb and all the adjectives that mean so! Trust me even smartphones are not smart, they’re just a hybrid of smartness and this dumbness. A computer can be dabbed intelligent if it can deceive you to think you are interacting with another human being. (This is known as Turing test, it was devised by Allan Turing, one of the fathers of AI)For example,Google assistant is making great steps towards this. To interact with her, just long press your home button as long as your device runs android 7 and above. Another system is the face ID by apple (see it here). The device actually knows the user. When you buy the phone, it has no idea of who you are. But after a series of pictures of your face from different angles, the device creates a model of your face and associates that model to you, just like you have created one of your girlfriend/ boyfriend if you have one anyway. Those are just a few examples and perhaps the self driving car will excite you even more.

There are however many questions surrounding the development of AI. The questions vary from philosophy, religion and ethics. I will address these in future..

The purpose of this article was to give you an idea of what artificial intelligence is. I hope you now are in the open. In the next series of articles, we will dive into the ‘how does all this happen’. What fuels AI, how is it possible? For example a self-driving car? How is that not satanic? Don’t worry, it is not. Just keep in touch.

Leave your comments and most importantly, QUESTIONS.