Neil Movold's List: Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is not yet HAL from the 2001: The Space Odyssey…but we are getting awfully close. Sure enough, one day it could be as similar to the sci-fi potboilers being churned out by Hollywood. If that’s your idea of what artificial intelligence is all about, then you aren’t far off the mark.

In layman’s terms, artificial intelligence is about creating intelligent machines through the use of intelligent computer programs. Most, if not all of artificial intelligence (AI) tries to mimic human behavior.

The scale of ambition is different, but artificial intelligence programming is a full-fledged field in the cutting edge of science today. If you have some interest in the world of tomorrow, check out these websites to grasp what artificial intelligence is all about.

A future dominated by artificial intelligence is quickly approaching. But according to Lars Hård, CTO of A.I. software company ExpertMaker, the time is now for the masses to master A.I. development in order to avoid a future controlled by savvy corporations.

You’ve heard it before: In the future, machines will rule us all. To some extent, they already do. We are increasingly tied to our gadgets and gizmos. They answer our questions, provide entertainment, and connect us with one another. But as technology advances, these machines will become staggeringly intelligent. Not long from now, teaching machines artificial intelligence, or how to learn on their own, will become as important as learning how to program is today.

Expertmaker is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) software company. By adding reasoning and learning, and by making knowledge searchable, we enable a new generation of adaptive search, discovery and recommendation systems.

Let’s begin by drawing the distinction between a tool and a robot. Tools enable us to work more efficiently. Robots do the work for us (in fact, the original word robata means “hard work” in Czech). The vast majority of the Web sites and apps we use today are tools that enable us to work, play and share more efficiently. Over the last few years, through advances in artificial intelligence and data science, Web sites and apps are evolving. There is a new breed of applications focused entirely on working on our behalf. As humans, we constantly seek means to reduce the amount of work needed to reap rewards from a system. While the tools of today allow us to work less, the robots of the future will eliminate much of the work in the first place.
This incredible transformation is happening right before our eyes.

Artificial intelligence began with an ambitious research agenda: To endow machines with some of the traits we value most highly in ourselves—the faculty of reason, skill in solving problems, creativity, the capacity to learn from experience. Early results were promising. Computers were programmed to play checkers and chess, to prove theorems in geometry, to solve analogy puzzles from IQ tests, to recognize letters of the alphabet. Marvin Minsky, one of the pioneers, declared in 1961: “We are on the threshold of an era that will be strongly influenced, and quite possibly dominated, by intelligent problem-solving machines.”

"We know how to deal with suspicious packages – as carefully as possible! These days, we let robots take the risk. But what if the robots are the risk? Some commentators argue we should be treating AI (artificial intelligence) as a suspicious package, because it might eventually blow up in our faces. Should we be worried?"

"The power and scope of artificial intelligence technology has taken great strides in the past year as a result of the rise in deep learning research, a subfield of artificial intelligence that mimics distinctly human processes to engineer extremely advanced technologies, according to a recent New York Times article. Harvard scientists have been at the center of these advances in “deep learning” technologies, which can be found in some of society’s newest gadgets—from the iPhone’s Siri program to voice recognition programs in many automobiles."

"According to the Times, true artificial intelligence is just around the corner. A year ago, the paper ran a front-page story about the wonders of new technologies, including deep learning, a neurally-inspired A.I. technique for statistical analysis. Then, among others, came an article about how I.B.M.’s Watson had been repurposed into a chef, followed by an upbeat post about quantum computation. On Sunday, the paper ran a front-page story about “biologically inspired processors,” “brainlike computers” that learn from experience."