WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)

WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)? Back in the 1950s, AI was first described as “any task performed by a program or a machine that, if a human carried out the same activity, we would say the human had to apply intelligence to accomplish the task”. This explanation was first coined by Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy. Marvin Minsky was an American cognitive scientist concerned largely with researching AI; he was co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory. John McCarthy was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. He first coined the phrase Artificial intelligence and spent most of his career at Stanford University. The pair are largely dubbed “the fathers of Artificial Intelligence”. Ai systems do demonstrate some human-like behaviors such as problem-solving, knowledge representation, planning, learning, reasoning, perception, motion, and manipulation. At the top-level AI falls into two categories. • Narrow AI • General AI WHAT CAN NARROW AI DO? Narrow AI is what we see all around us in computers today: intelligent systems that have been taught or have learned how to carry out specific tasks without being explicitly programmed how to do so. This type of machine intelligence is evident in the speech and language recognition of the Siri virtual assistant on the Apple iPhone, in the vision-recognition systems on self-driving cars, in the recommendation engines that suggest products you might like based on what you bought in the past. Unlike humans, these systems can only learn or be taught how to do specific tasks, which is why they are called narrow AI. WHAT CAN GENERAL AI DO? Artificial general intelligence is very different and is the type of adaptable intellect found in humans, a flexible form of intelligence capable of learning how to carry out vastly different tasks, anything from haircutting to building spreadsheets, or reasoning about a wide variety of topics based on its accumulated experience. This is the sort of AI more commonly seen in movies, the likes of HAL in 2001 or Skynet in The Terminator, but which doesn't exist today, and AI experts are fiercely divided over how soon it will become a reality.