What does Artificial Intelligence (AI) mean?
The term artificial intelligence was coined in 1955 by John McCarthy, a math professor at Dartmouth who organized the seminal conference on the topic the following year. Ever since, perhaps in part because of its evocative name, the field has given rise to more than its share of fantastic claims and promises according to Harvard Business Review.
Techopedia defines Artificial intelligence (AI) as an area of computer science that emphasizes the creation of intelligent machines that work and react like humans. Some of the activities computers with artificial intelligence are designed for include:
- Speech recognition
- Learning
- Planning
- Problem solving
Trends
In late October 2017, Saudi Arabia has made history by becoming the first country to grant citizenship to a robot, the humanoid robot, Sophia.
Though Artificial Intelligence is one of the fastest-growing areas for high-tech professionals, there are too few qualified engineers, according to a recent Kiplinger report.
Robotics and artificial intelligence will impact wide segments of daily life by 2025, with huge implications for a range of industries such as health care, transport and logistics, customer service, and home maintenance.
The need for AI specialists exists in just about every field as companies seek to give computers the ability to think, learn, and adapt.
One of the building blocks of AI is machine learning. Machine learning includes technologies such as deep learning, neural networks and natural-language processing and encompasses more advanced systems that understand, learn, predict and adapt without being explicitly programmed, thereby operating autonomously.
Machine learning has been helping create these intelligent systems that go beyond simply executing predefined instructions. What machine learning is good at is helping us simultaneously work with multiple types of data, text, images, live sensor inputs, media and video feeds. More importantly, it is really good at recognizing patterns within these data and relating them to each other in ways that would be very hard to program. This leads to untold benefits in automation of how data is analyzed and provided to decision makers.
In the sphere of business, AI is poised to have a transformational impact, on the scale of earlier general-purpose technologies. Although it is already in use in thousands of companies around the world, most big opportunities have not yet been tapped.
The effects of AI will be magnified in the coming decade, as manufacturing, retailing, transportation, finance, health care, law, advertising, insurance, entertainment, education, and virtually every other industry transform their core processes and business models to take advantage of machine learning. The bottleneck now is in management, implementation, and business imagination.
It’s estimated that 40% of online transactions will be handled via an AI-enabled bot by 2020. The speed of adoption is fascinating even if we only hit 25% by that time.
For further information: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
*AAAI – Founded in 1979, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) (formerly the American Association for Artificial Intelligence) is a nonprofit scientific society devoted to advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines.