Artificial intelligence (AI) is a computer science discipline that aims at developing computer systems that have the capability of human like intelligence. Intelligent machines are capable of speech recognition, sight, making decisions based on sound judgment of data analytics, play games and compete with humans, pattern recognition and also machine learning to improve the quality of decisions and activity. The conversation to have machines think like humans and the term artificial intelligence was introduced in 1956 by John McCarthy whereby he addressed an academic conference on the subject.
Before that, in 1936, British Mathematician Alan Turing came up with the famous Turing Machine that proved his theory that indeed, a computer was capable of cognitive process execution. This laid the foundation for what is today termed as AI.
In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) created ELIZA, a program that could communicate with humans. This was the first chatbot ever developed. In 1972, ‘MYCIN’ was developed by Ted Shortliffe at Stanford University for the medical field. MYCIN was used for diagnosis and treatment of illnesses.
Terrence J. Sejnowski in conjunction with Charles Rosenberg took this field a notch higher by incorporating voice to a computer program in 1986. ‘NETtalk’ was able to read out words correctly. Significant advancement in the field of AI was made here as artificial neural networks were born. NETtalk was able to make conclusions from large databases of data supplied to it.
At the peak of AI advancement, a computer system beat the world’s chess champion in 1997. The chess computer ‘Deep Blue’ defeated Garry Kasparov in a chess competition. Even though this win is greatly criticized as a win through calculation of all possible outcomes and not cognitive intelligence, it is still considered a major break in this field.
Fast forward to 2018, ‘Project Debater’ was made to argue with two great debaters in a debate on space travel, where it performed pretty well. On the same note, Google’s Duplex was able to make a call to a salon and make a hairdressing appointment without the recipient of the call noticing that they were having a conversation with a machine
Examples of Real Life AI implementations
Today, Artificial intelligence has been implemented in several areas of our daily lives to improve the efficiency and customer service delivery. These include:
Social media – AI is used by LinkedIn to create employee-employer matches by suggesting jobs that one may be a perfect candidate for. Pinterest uses a lens tool to target and identify an object in an image with many objects and give suggestions of the selected object.
Online Shopping – Chatbots such as Amazon’s Alexa and Siri have revolutionized e-commerce and user-machine interaction respectively. It is no doubt that Alexa’s exemplary speech recognition has been used in other errands such as scheduling appointments, controlling other interconnected devices in smart homes, set alarms, among others.
Web searches – These have been made better with AI applications such as Google’s predictive search, that helps suggest what you may be intending to search based on information collected about you such as age, gender and location.
Other areas that AI has done exemplary well include Maps and Directions, Quantum computing, aviation, agriculture, email communication, just to mention a few.
The future of AI
It is predicted that AI will grow to the point where human resources will be reduced by more than 50%. This is because machine learning will greatly reduce the need for humans and will be able to perform almost all activities that human resources can perform.
This is expected to spread in the fields of education, finance through algorithmic trading, market analysis and data mining, government and medicine.
