Nowadays, Artificial Intelligence(AI) is one of the emerging technologies and it is much more than a trend. Day by day, AI is getting more and more involved in our lives. Let’s start with some everyday examples and then continue with the formal definition.
1) Personal Smart Assistants
Now that voice-to-text technology is accurate enough to rely on for basic conversation, it has become the control interface for a new generation of smart personal assistants. Google’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana are well known personal assistants. The common point of all is that they help us find useful information when we ask for it using our voice. To give an example, Siri can perform internet search, Alexa can create to-do lists, and Cortana can manage your calendar, based on your voice commands.
2) Driving Assistants
AI is not only assisting to us but also making our life easier in various domains. Suppose you want to go from point A to point B, and there are several possible ways to choose. Which one is the shortest path? Which one has no traffic? Which one is closed to traffic? Navigation systems such as Google Navigation, Yandex Navigation are reaching us for help. They can find the best possible route within seconds. On the other hand, AI also supports and improves the driving experience of us. Autopilots can drive and park instead of us. To give an interesting example, The New York Times reports that the average flight of a Boeing plane involves only seven minutes of human-steered flight, which is typically reserved only for takeoff and landing. Additionally, they can detect traffic signs or they can warn you in case of any distraction, too.
Formal Definition of AI
Examples are not limited to these, but I believe you get the main point. The main goal of AI is to simulate human reasoning. Formally, AI can be defined as “the ability of a system to correctly interpret external data, learn from such data, and use that knowledge to achieve concrete tasks and goals through flexible adaptation.”
The ‘intelligence’ keyword is also a very tricky concept. AI isn’t a system which is capable of solving any given task as a human being would. It might be in the future, but for now it is not. However, these technologies are labelled as ‘intelligent’ because they can imitate intelligent behaviors such as learning from experiences or figures to solve a specific problem.
In the next blog, I will continue with one of the major subfields of AI, which is Machine Learning.