“It’s smart, it speaks, and it’s spreading”. That has been a very common notion nowadays. We carry them in our pockets, they are to assist us whenever we need them. We interact with AI powered NPCs (non-playable characters) in video games. We’re developing cars that can drive themselves, and we interact with chatbots deployed by businesses for marketing and support purposes on a daily basis. To the extent of interactive operating systems, and what not. A.I. has transformed the world, the innovation of technology has diversified due to A.I. Even the latest trends of emotional and sentimental analysis of humans are being done with A.I. technology
As Elon Musk says, “Humanity is a kind of ‘Biological Boot loader’ for A.I.” Machine Intelligence or popularly known as Artificial Intelligence, has now been the topic of the millennia and has turned out to be a “hot cake” for the publication media and common masses. Who does not know AI, we all are a part of this global network of technological change from natural human intelligence to the so called “Artificial Intelligence”. From Facebook Jarvis, Microsoft Cortana, Google Assistant to Amazon Alexa, we all have our virtual assistants now waiting for our commands. Some people also have gone to the extent of visualizing humanoid robots which is a technology in the undertaking. The very nature of the term “artificial intelligence” brings up philosophical questions whether intelligent behaviour implies or requires the existence of a mind, and to what extent is consciousness replicable as computation.
The history begins from the famous Turing Test discovered by Alan Turing, rightfully judged the father of computer science. He was very much fascinated in intelligence and thinking and the possibility of simulating them by machines. Turing’s most prominent contribution to AI is his imitation game, which later became known as the Turing test. This test proves that if a human does not understand the person who he/she is interacting with is actually a machine, then it could be defined as machine intelligence. In other words, an entity is intelligent if it cannot be distinguished from another intelligent entity by observing its behavior. Turing just constrained the set of behaviors into discussion so that the interrogator can’t base her or his decision on appearances.
But actually is being human like, defines a thing as intelligent entity. This was the foremost criticism when the Turing Test came up. The best counter argument came from John Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment. Then came the terms strong A.I. and weak A.I. Strong A.I. or Artificial General Intelligence is the capability of machines mimicking human intelligence and is highly synchronous with it. The important characteristics of Strong A.I. are ability to reason, solve puzzles, make judgments, plan, learn, and communicate. It should also have consciousness, objective thoughts, self-awareness, sentience, and sapience. On the contrary, Weak A.I. or Narrow AI, is machine intelligence that is limited to a specific or narrow area. Weak Artificial Intelligence (AI) simulates human cognition and benefits mankind by automating time-consuming tasks and by analyzing data in ways that humans sometimes can’t.
Innovation is happening on a day to day basis and things have come to such a state that 66% of the tweets that are posted on the social Media Platform Twitter are posted by bots that are equipped with A.I. Nowadays according to the recent trends A.I. is being trained using tons and tons of data sets leading to fields like data mining and data science. The machine is made to understand the patterns from the data which thus leads to machine learning or machine perception. Now when these results from pattern recognition are put into machines that resemble a human being and is able to replicate certain human movements and functions automatically is called robotics powered with A.I.
Now there has been a recent question that what is going to be the future of A.I. Now to answer this highly elaborative question is difficult because it will be highly assumptions based and actually very much different from the true fact that is going to happen. The question maybe what is the ultimate goal of A.I. Maybe, the final goal of AI is to achieve a kind of general intelligence similar to a human’s which has been one of the most ambitious ever proposed by science. In terms of difficulty, it is comparable to other great scientific goals, such as explaining the origin of life or the Universe, or discovering the structure of matter. Maybe in the future we could see self-reproducing machines that are able to make their own selves.