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What is Artificial Intelligence?

    • 121 posts
    March 25, 2021 9:49 AM GMT

    This is an informative post provided as background to the post on Society and our Artificial Intelligence Future.

     

    What is Artificial Intelligence?

    We see Artificial Intelligence as multi-faceted, covering a spectrum which includes:

    Ability to analyse past examples and learn (deep learning to construct and apply new strategies)
    Ability to make sense of and interact with our world (s
    peech, intonation, object recognition, touch etc.)
    Ability to adapt behaviour (systems which can change the way they operate based on experience)
    Ability to reason (making decisions, judgements, problem-solving and predicting)
    Ability to apply learning from one environment to others (and therefore tackle any problem)
    Ability to understand (understanding behaviour and exhibiting empathy and patience) 
    Ability to understand and reproduce human behaviours (using the above coupled with robotics)
    Ability to be self-aware (forming representations of oneself)

    AI solutions may use some or all of these and range from software-only internet solutions to autonomous robot solutions and in the future augmented human intelligence implants.

    At the moment all solutions fall into the category known as ‘Narrow or Weak AI’ i.e. AI applied in specific environments such as medical diagnosis. ‘Strong or General AI’ is able to generalise learning from one environment in another and in the limit equate to human intelligence.

    In an interview in 2017 with Demis Hassabis the CEO of Deep Mind, the British company bought by Google, he claimed they had achieved the ability to apply learning from one environment in another but we have seen no announcements of any applications since.

     

    For a full view of Artificial Intelligence and its future impact on society see our document Artificial Intelligence - Managing the Future.


    This post was edited by # Probably42 at March 25, 2021 9:53 AM GMT