What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

The term Artificial Intelligence can be applied to any machine that exhibits traits associated with a human mind, such as learning and solving problems. The ideal characteristic of Artificial Intelligence is the ability to rationalize and take actions that have the best chance of achieving a specific goal.

Artificial Intelligence is the study of what intelligence is and the process of creating systems that are more useful and smart. AI is an interdisciplinary field that includes psychology, philosophy, linguistic, electrical engineering, and computing science.

Well, in simple words AI is like the voice assistant on your smartphone or if you want an example from movies it would be like ULTRON or J.A.R.V.I.S from the movie Avengers: Age of Ultron. While science fiction often portrays AI as robots with human-like characteristics, AI can encompass anything from Google’s search algorithms to IBM’s Watson to autonomous weapons.

Also, Artificial Intelligence is the future and one of the best career options in the programming field. If you are an AI aspirant and like to know where to start or which programming languages you have to learn to step in the AI field, then check out this article.

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence:

John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1956, defines it as “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.”Other names for the field have been proposed, such as computational intelligence, synthetic intelligence or computational rationality.

From Google Assistant to self-driving cars, Artificial Intelligence is progressing pretty quickly. Artificial intelligence today is properly known as narrow AI, in that it is designed to perform a narrow task (e.g. only facial recognition or only internet searches or only driving a car).

A true artificially-intelligent system is one that can learn on its own. We’re talking about neural networks from the likes of Google’s DeepMind, which can make connections and reach meanings without relying on pre-defined behavioral algorithms. True A.I. can improve on past iterations, getting smarter and more aware, allowing it to enhance its capabilities and its knowledge.

Two categories of Artificial Intelligence:

Artificial Intelligence generally falls under two broad categories:

Narrow AI

Sometimes referred to as “Weak AI,” this kind of artificial intelligence operates within a limited context and is a simulation of human intelligence. Narrow AI is often focused on performing a single task extremely well and while these machines may seem intelligent, they are operating under far more constraints and limitations than even the most basic human intelligence.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

AGI, sometimes referred to as “Strong AI,” is the kind of artificial intelligence we see in the movies, like the robot from iRobot named Sonny or Legion from Terminator. AGI is a machine with general intelligence and, much like a human being, it can apply that intelligence to solve any problem

Impact of Artificial Intelligence in our everyday lives:

There are so many amazing ways artificial intelligence and machine learning are used behind the scenes to impact our everyday lives. AI assists in every area of our lives, whether we’re trying to read our emails, get driving directions, get music or movie recommendations.

1. Digital Voice Assistants

Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana are digital assistants that help users perform various tasks, like checking their schedules and searching for something on the net, sending messages to someone, etc. AI is an important part of how these apps work because they learn from every single user interaction. These assistants use Machine Learning technology to get smarter and better able to predict and understand our natural language questions and requests.

2. Self-Driving and Parking Vehicles

Self-driving and parking cars use AI, to recognize the space around a vehicle with the help of cameras and sensors around the car. Technology company Nvidia uses AI to give cars “the power to see, think, and learn, so they can navigate a nearly infinite range of possible driving scenarios,”. The company’s AI-powered technology is already in use in cars made by Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Volvo, and Tesla, and is sure to revolutionize how people drive and enable vehicles to drive themselves.

3. Online Product Recommendations

Many eCommerce sites like Amazon and other online retailers use AI to gather information about your preferences and buying habits. Then, they personalize your shopping experience by suggesting new products tailored to your habits. The AI on these sites learns about your product preference based on your searches and previous shopping.

4. Entertainment

AI has brought a big change in the entertainment industry. Nowadays, we can consume the media when we want, where we want and how we want, thanks to the new technologies. When it comes to entertainment, the algorithms being used by various applications make our life much simpler.

Let’s take an example of YoutTube — When you search for a video on YouTube, it not only shows the videos based on the keywords, it tries to analyze the keyword and tries to match the keyword with contents available from the billions of videos available in it and shows them. After that, it shows related videos to what you have watched.

5. Social Media

Artificial intelligence makes it easier for users to locate and communicate with friends and business associates. Let’s take an example of Facebook — AI helps the user to get in contact with people using the location and the friends of friends thing. They are pretty useful, sometimes you don’t even have to search for a friend, Facebook may show it in “People you may know” if your friend is near your location.

6. Filters in Gmail

Google uses AI to ensure that nearly all of the email landing in your inbox is valid. The filters attempt to sort emails into the following categories: Primary, Social, Promotions, Updates, Forums, Spam.

The program helps your emails get organized so you can find your way to important communications quicker.

7. Google Searches

When you begin typing a search term and Google makes recommendations for you to choose from, that’s AI working. Predictive searches are based on data that Google collects about you, such as your location, age, and other personal details. Using AI, the search engine attempts to guess what you might be trying to find.

8. Music Recommendations

Music services use AI to track your listening habits. Then, they use the information to suggest other songs you might like to hear. AI-powered suggestions take into account factors like weather and time of day to offer music that can set the mood for activities. For example, you might be offered a playlist of dance music on a Friday night or soft acoustic music on a rainy day.

9. Maps and Directions

When apps like Google Maps calculate traffic and construction in order to find the quickest route to your destination, that’s AI at work, and if you by chance take a wrong turn it will quickly reroute and show another route from where you took the wrong turn.

10. Commercial Airline Flights

AI autopilots in commercial airlines is an early use of AI technology that dates as far back as 1914. You might be surprised to discover how little flying pilot actually does in the cockpit. A survey of airline Boeing 777 pilots reported spending only 7 minutes manually flying which is only during the takeoff and landing, and the rest being done by AI technology. Airliners are working toward building jetliners completely piloted by Artificial Intelligence — with no human pilots at the helm.

11. Games

The game industry is surely one of the earliest users of AI. The integration started very small with the use of AI to generate random levels that people can play. However, that has increased to a level that goes far beyond what one can even imagine. When you are playing a game such as PUBG or Fortnite, you essentially start against a couple of AI-powered bots and then move to play against real players.

Any game that you play has some sort of AI element to it. Even when you are playing a single person story mode game, you are playing against AI bosses. If you are playing racing games, you are racing against AI bots. AI use in gaming is endless. So, if you play any game, you are using AI.

12. Online Ads Network

One of the biggest users of Artificial Intelligence is the online ad industry which uses AI to not only track user statistics but also serves ads based on those statistics. Without AI it would show random ads to users with no connection to their preferences. AI has become so successful in determining our interests and serving us ads that the ad industry has been earning a lot of money.

Artificial Intelligence makes our lives pretty easy every day it powers many programs and services that help us do everyday things such as connecting with friends, using an email program.

Applications of Artificial Intelligence in other sectors:

AI is completely changing the way we live and get things done. It learns, reasons and does self-correction. Starting with the identifying pattern, it has made data more efficient. In today’s time, to gain more insight out of the data, businesses have changed a lot in the course of time.

Artificial Intelligence is advancing dramatically. It is already transforming our world socially, economically and politically.

1. Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare

Better healthcare — the most important thing that humans need in today’s generation. Health is wealth, and the rate at which humans are compromising on it is really shocking.

AI enables the workflow of assistants which helps the doctors to free up their schedules and also reduce the time and cost by streamlining processes. AI-powered technology helps pathologists in analyzing samples of tissue and helps the treatment to be more accurate.

The AI-based applications are useful in understanding medical data and reaching the right conclusion without direct human input. These applications are applied in diagnosis processes, treatment protocol development, drug development, personalized medicine, and patient monitoring and care.

An organization called Cambio Health Care developed a clinical decision support system for stroke prevention that can give the physician a warning when there’s a patient at risk of having a heart stroke.

2. Artificial Intelligence in Business

A business completely relies on real-time reporting, accuracy, and processing of large volumes of quantitative data to make important decisions. The adaptive intelligence, automation helps to smoothen out the business process.

Let’s take an example of the help desk available on different websites. AI is used in online help centers. When you visit a website, you must have seen that the chat window pops up. You can then ask questions there and they revert to your problem or query in no time. This reduces the repetitive tasks that are normally performed by humans.

3. Artificial Intelligence in Education

It must be very hard for a teacher to grade homework and tests for large lecture courses. A significant amount of time is consumed. So, with the automated grading system checking multiple-choice questions and automated grading of students can be done easily.

AI is making our education system smarter and AI & virtual networks are used to make a perfect learning environment for students as well as teachers.

4. Artificial Intelligence in Autonomous Vehicles

Companies are working on driverless cars and these are only possible with the help of AI. The AI uses the cameras and sensors on the cars to avoid collisions and reach the destination without causing any stress for the user.

This is where artificial intelligence is used and where it can be compared to the human brain. Some of its usage in autonomous vehicles are:

• Directing the car to the gas station or recharge station when it is running low on fuel.
• Adjust the trip’s directions based on known traffic conditions to find the quickest route.

5. Artificial Intelligence in Construction

The construction sector is going to get the benefit out of the implementation of AI. AI-based applications have been widely being used in the construction sectors. AI could suggest the ideal design for buildings and recommend the best safety features to make lives more secure, by running some simulation on the design, the AI can come up with risks involved in the design and suggest a solution for the risk.

The AI-based application will make the engineers more productive and capable of delivering high-quality work in the stipulated time frame. Moreover, the technology will be useful in analyzing the work and the process of the construction industry.

6. Artificial Intelligence in Banking

Banks and other financial institutions have been showing interest in the adoption of AI or Machine Learning. It has a huge impact on the business and commerce of the banking industry. A lot of banks have already adopted AI-based systems to provide customer support, detect anomalies and credit card frauds.

Some leading banks also used AI technology in the field of an intelligent virtual assistant to improve their customer services. While some financial institutions have been using to prevent fraud and monitor potential threats to customers in commerce.

All of our lives are impacted by artificial intelligence on a daily basis. Whenever we are using our smartphones, surfing the internet, buying products online, using navigation, wasting time on social media or listening to songs on our favorite music online AI is impacting our choices in one way or another.

Let’s stay alert we don’t know when they might take over our world, or we could actually create one to save our world from those. I know its hard, let’s try.