Definition of ai ; CURRENT AI; FUTURE AI
1. Definition of ai
OK ... you asked for it. Here goes. The term "Artificial intelligence” (AI, Ai or ai) dates back to about the mid-1950's. (The 1950's were famous for the development of creative "Rock & Roll" music. Remember Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bo Diddley, Elvis, Buddy Holly, Johnny Cash, Connie Francis, etc, etc? So, it was only fitting for that time period to also be the time of the start of development of creative ai).
Ai was probably named in the mid-1950's by Stanford professor / researcher John McCarthy as a sub-field of the larger academic study of computer science.
Artificial intelligence is the ability of a machine (machine learning) or of computer software programs (or both) to find, assemble, process, calculate, translate, think, reason, learn, problem-solve, identify risks, create speech recognition, develop human-like speech generation, incorporate feedback, remember, reduce errors, exercise continuous improvement, and potentially act (to some extent). It could be performing in a manner that some people would consider it as ... "intelligent."
It is all about building machines or developing software / firmware capable of: finding, assembling, processing, calculating, translating, thinking, reasoning, learning, problem-solving, identifying risks, creating speech-recognition, developing human-like speech generation, exercising continuous improvement, remembering, reducing errors, incorporating feedback, and potentially acting / performing (to some extent ) like people. The ai definition includes interdisciplinary scope as well as working in specific environments. It duplicates the human thought process and behavior. It should act in a person - like way that is intelligent, rational, reasonable, timely, and (of course in my opinion) ethical with integrity.
Ai is possible nowadays due to: (1) giant increases in computational capabilities; (2) huge growths in data (big data); (3) focusing on specific / unique problem issues; (4) being able to timely convert those unique issues / problems into targeted knowledge engineering rules (algorithms) so that ai systems can learn; (5) allowing ai systems to learn the rules automatically, and (6) efficiently plugging the resulting rules into appropriate ai systems.
There is also included in this ai definition the difference between Weak Ai and Strong Ai. Strong Ai genuinely simulates human reasoning while Weak Ai is just focusing on getting a system to work without simulating human cognitive behavior (thinking the way a human would think). Today most of the Ai work falls somewhere between Weak Ai and Strong Ai. Let's call that Midway Ai. (Yep ... Midway Ai is a term that is purely coined by me). Anyways ... we are not yet in the Robot Masters phase of Ai !
JOHN (JOHNNY) E. MILLER
512 619 7512
2. Current ai applications
Here is a link to 10 current everyday ai applications:
https://beebom.com/examples-of-artificial-intelligence/
Johnny Miller's Thoughts:
Follow the money. Ai and its subset, machine learning, are both getting a huge amount of: (1) start-up ("Unicorn") VC funding,; (2) big company funding (Amazon, MS, FaceBook, Google, Apple, Oracle, Accenture, Twitter, IBM, etc), and (3) government funding (US, China, UK, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, and South Korea ( in that order) today.
For example (according to ABI Research) , in 2017 in the USA with its 155 ai VC companies there was US$ 4.4 billion in just VC Unicorn-type funding (not including big company and government funding). Chinese ai VC funding from its 19 ai companies for 2017 was US$ 4.9 billion. Ai government funding and ai big company investments in ai funding for 2017 is hard to calculate ... but consider this: SenseTime is a Chinese big ai company. Its valued at US$ 4.5 billion.
Even with all of this ai VC funding, it is possible that the resulting ai solutions might not work out.
Will ai prove itself out? Is it the big wave promised and will the ai bubble remain inflated? Ai has tremendous promise. I think that the US ROI will be met. But there is a lot of competition.
Having the right people in your labor force is important. For example, data engineers and data scientists are both urgently needed. Data scientists do the ai deep analysis. Data engineers do the management and cleaning of big data for use by data scientists. Data scientists do the deep analysis of clean big data. You need more data engineers than data scientists. Obviously, a data scientist needs to have very high STEM skills.
The governments of the US and China. overwhelmingly dominate the ai race. China has both its huge tech giants and government collaborating and working closely. The privacy issues do not hamper ai in China. The Chinese are adding Ai to the high school curriculum as a mandatory subject. The US has a promising ai labor force. There are ai centers in the US in places like New York, Boston (MIT, Harvard), Pittsburg, Seattle ,(MS, Amazon) Washington DC, Austin, northern and southern California.
The global ai race is on. Japan is soaring in ai robotics but has an aging labor force. South Korea is pushing electronics, medical, and health ai and will soon have 5000 new data engineers. UK and France are leading the way in responsible and ethical ai. Russia believes its future rests on ai and has sizable ai funding but lacks the creation of VC funding by companies.
MORE TO COME. STAY TUNED.
3. Future ai applications
Here is an interesting article about the future of ai:
"Eighteen artificial intelligence researchers reveal below the profound changes coming to our lives that will likely result from ai.
Artificial intelligence (AI, Ai, or ai) has been changing our lives for decades, but never has AI felt more ubiquitous than now.
It seems as though not a week passes without yet another Ai system overcoming an unprecedented hurdle or outperforming humans.
But how the future of AI will pan out for humans remains to be seen. AI could either make all our dreams come true, or destroy society and the world as we know it.
To get a realistic handle on what that future might look like, Tech Insider spoke to 18 artificial intelligence researchers, roboticists, and computer scientists about the single most profound change artificial intelligence could bring.
Scroll down to see the results:
Pieter Abbell: Robots will keep us safer, especially from disasters. AI for robotics will allow us to address the challenges in taking care of an aging population and allow for much longer independence.
It'll enable drastically reducing, maybe even bringing to zero, traffic accidents and deaths. And enable disaster response for dangerous situations, for example, the nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima power plant.
Commentary from Pieter Abbeel, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.
Shimon Whiteson says we will all become cyborgs. I really think in the future we are all going to be cyborgs. I think this is something that people really underestimate about AI. They have a tendency to think. Tthere's us and then there's computers. Maybe the computers will be our friends and maybe they'll be our enemies, but we'll be separate from them.
I think that's not true at all, I think the human and the computer are really, really quickly becoming one tightly-coupled cognitive unit.
Imagine how much more productive we would be if we could augment our brains with infallible memories and infallible calculators.
Society is already wrestling with difficult questions about privacy and security that have been raised by the internet. Imagine when the internet is in your brain, if the NSA can see into your brain, if hackers can hack into your brain.
Imagine if skills could just be downloaded — what's going to happen when we have this kind of AI but only the rich can afford to become cyborgs, what's that going to do to society?
Commentary from Shimon Whiteson, an associate professor at the Informatics Institute at the University of Amsterdam.
Yoky Matsuoka says these implants will make humans better at everything.
JHU Applied Physics Laboratory
I think the way I have been promoting AI as well as the next big space aspect for AI is to become really an assistant for humans. So making humans better, making what humans want to do and what humans want to be, easier to achieve with the help from AI.
What if I lost a limb and I can't swim as fast, what if an AI can actually know how to control this robotic limb that's now attached to me to quickly and efficiently let me swim?
Those are the ways, my brain is doing control but to an extent, things that I can't do anymore or things I want to be, if that part can be intelligently handled that's really great. It's almost like a partnership.
Commentary from Yoky Matsuoka, former Vice President of Technology at Nest.
Thomas Dietterich doesn't stop there, he hopes AI will turn us into superhumans.
Thomas Dietterich doesn't stop there, he hopes AI will turn us into superhumans.
Yuriko Nakao
I think combinations of human and artificial intelligence are fascinating and have potential to create combined systems that are smarter than either alone. We already see this in many applications of AI — I'm smarter when I have access to Google.
Future systems may work via augmented reality or by giving us sensory abilities far beyond existing vision, hearing, and manipulation. For example, I hope that exoskeletons will allow me to walk when I am old and feeble. I hope that I can retain my sense of hearing and sight even as my eyes and ears fail.
Commentary from Thomas Dietterich, the President of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
Stuart Russell says very smart computers could solve all our problems, including climate change.
Stuart Russell says very smart computers could solve all our problems, including climate change.
AP
If you had a system that could read all the pages and understand the context instead of just throwing back 26 million pages to answer your query, that kind of program could actually answer the questions asked.
It'll be like if you asked a real question and got an answer from a person who had really read all those millions and millions and billions of pages and understood them and been able to synthesize all that information.
Everything we have of value as human beings, as a civilization, is the result of our intelligence and what AI could do is essentially be a power tool that magnifies human intelligence and gives us the ability to move our civilization forward in all kinds of ways.
It might be curing disease, it might eliminating poverty. I think it certainly should be preventing environmental catastrophe. AI could be instrumental to all those things.
Commentary from Stuart Russell, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.
Oren Etzioni says AI might even save the world.
NASA Johnson/YouTube
When we're talking about something that is at least 50 to 100, maybe even a thousand years away, it's very speculative. But when and if we have that, I would say that the sky's the limit.
All these things that we've contemplated, whether it's space travel or solutions to diseases that plague us, Ebola virus, all of these things would be a lot more tractable if the machines are trying to solve these problems.
I view today's computers as souped-up pencils but nowhere near the potential that they could have if they were able to perform effectively, much more sophisticated.
Commentary from Oren Etzioni, the CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
Sabine Hauert says it will open up whole new worlds to explore.
Paramount Pictures
I really think that robotics is going to improve the way we work, the way we live, and the way we explore new frontiers — if you think of the ocean, if you think of space. I think this will be done incrementally, because it's a hard thing to do.
I think it's going to also be integrated in the sense that you might have a robot car, but you're not going to think of it as an AI or a robot, you're going to think of it as a car.
A lot of these things that we'll be introducing will be seen as helpful technologies, just like your cell phone is a helpful technology, but not as lots of robots entering our work or entering our homes. They'll just be seen as smarter tech.
Commentary from Sabine Hauert, a roboticist at Bristol University.
Joanna Bryson says some of these amazing applications are already here, and it's making people easier to predict.
Joanna Bryson says some of these amazing applications are already here, and it's making people easier to predict.
Garry Knight/Flickr
Basically what learning is about, including machine learning, is using the past to make predictions about the future.
You might be able to predict who will start dating or who will get divorced. You can figure out when people are going to have kids sometimes by just the stuff they buy and what neighborhoods they move into. You can figure out more and more intimate details and be able to predict what each other will do.
People are already getting really good at predicting what we are going to do and then manipulating that to get us to buy things, or to vote particular ways.
Joanna Bryson, computer scientist and visiting fellow at the Princeton University.
But these changes will happen so slowly we won't notice it at first, Peter Stone says.
But these changes will happen so slowly we won't notice it at first, Peter Stone says.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
There's not one most significant change it will make.
Artificial intelligence is really embedded in many of the devices we already use, from cars to search engines, everything, and I think all of these, every technology we use changes our lives in profound ways.
I don't think there's a single change that going to be black and white once we're on one side and now there's a change and we're on the other side. It's a cumulative effect of everything, AI is embedded in many of the technologies that have been changing our world over the last several decades and will continue to do so.
Commentary from Peter Stone, a computer scientist at the University of Texas, Austin.
As more sophisticated AI trickles into our lives, Hector Geffner says it will also change how we connect with other humans.
As more sophisticated AI trickles into our lives, Hector Geffner says it will also change how we connect with other humans.
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Picture
One significant change will be socialization. The movie "Her" goes in that direction.
We are social beings and need people around, but increasingly, in some societies, many people seem to be more comfortable dealing with people through machines — through mobile, messenger, etc — than in person.
As machines get more intelligent and can better adapt to its "users," people may end up preferring dealing with machines than with people. Of course, this says something about who we are.
Commentary from Hector Geffner, researcher at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
Carlos Guestrin says they might even become our best buddies.
Carlos Guestrin says they might even become our best buddies.
SoftBank
Computers and humans are very different in terms of how they think about the world. I think what's going to be most profound is our impact, positive and negative but mostly positive, on the kind of almost symbiotic relationship between humans and technology.
We've already seen that. I'm sure you have a smartphone today and you can see a lot of people experiencing the world through their smartphones, in some negative ways.
But also in positive ways, it's helped us, made us more connected to people that we love, made it easier for us to maintain contact with information, keep track of what's happening in the world, figure out what restaurants go to next, where to watch movies. It's really augmented our understanding of what the world is.
Commentary from Carlos Guestrin, the CEO and co-founder of Dato, a company that builds artificially intelligent systems to analyze data.
These friendly robots could give the elderly live better lives, Matthew Taylor says.
These friendly robots could give the elderly live better lives, Matthew Taylor.
As we have more of the population growing older, the better we can enable them to stay in their homes longer, the more happy they are, and the healthier they are, the better it is for the whole healthcare system.
We can have more home robots that can help people with these activities of daily living: Making sure people take their medicine, helping them prepare their food, making sure that if they don't get out of bed someone is notified.
I think all of that is pretty low hanging fruit — stuff that will be easy to develop in the next few years. It will really cause a big change to that population, allowing them higher quality of life and also letting them stay in their homes longer.
Commentary from Matthew Taylor, a computer scientist at Washington State University.
They'll also improve medical care, Murray Shanahan says.
Nurse Health Practitioner Rachelle Quimpo.
A very important implication of the kind of AI technology that's coming soon will be in the area of personalized medicine. A great application of machine learning technology applied to big data is in personalized medicine.
If everybody's genome is sequenced, and their medical records are in very fine detail, and you have access to an enormous quantity of clinical studies and so on, it's possible, thanks to machine learning, to match up very very carefully individual problems with very specialized treatments that are tailored for exactly that kind of person.
At the moment, medicine is very statistical and treatments are tailored for large populations and not for the individual so I think that will have a dramatic effect.
Commentary from Murray Shanahan, a computer scientist at Imperial College.
Super intelligent computers could also make internet access available to people who don't have it now, according to Yoshua Bengio.
Super intelligent computers could also make internet access available to people who don't have it now, according to Yoshua Bengio.
A boy sits among children using tablet computers given to them by the One Laptop Per Child project in the village of Wenchi, Ethiopia. Jason Strazius
A computer that better understands what we want and does things for us could have a huge impact on the billions of people on the Earth who aren't even able to interact with a computer because they can't read or write.
There are lots and lots of people that don't have access to knowledge because they don't know how to read and write, and don't have access to a computer.
If computers are able to converse in natural language and really understand what people are asking and give sensible answers it might really have a big impact on all of these people that currently don't benefit from the kind of technology that we do.
Commentary from Yoshua Bengio, a computer scientist at University of Montreal.
AI could also give us more time to be creative, says Lynne Parker.
AI could also give us more time to be creative, says Lynne Parker.
LoganSavage/Flickr
AI could open us up to the ability to be creative and to really think broadly because it can relieve us of some meaningless jobs.
I think there's a potential there if we seize the opportunity to be relieved from everyday mundane things to do things that are more impactful and really more human, more intelligent, more creative.
Whether or not we will seize the day, as they say, is a question to be answered.
Commentary from Lynne Parker, the division director for the Information and Intelligent Systems Division at the National Science Foundation.
Toby Walsh says these impacts will completely revolutionize how we live and work.
Adam Berry/Getty
I think we're going to see similar profound changes in the nature of work, as much as that work can be automated even further by computers. It's hard to think of a job that a computer ultimately won't be able to do as well if not better than we can do.
That's going to require profound changes within society in terms of are we going to work a shorter working week? How are we going to distribute the wealth that this generates?
This is a challenge not for scientists but one for society to address, of how are we going to work through these changes.
One of the great challenges is that computers and AI as a technology are very quickly adopted. The great thing about computers is that you can reproduce the software almost at no cost. So once we have the technology it gets very easy to reproduce the technology and disseminate it.
The changes that we see precipitated by changes in computing are ones that tend to happen very very quickly. The challenge there is that society tends to change rather slowly.
Commentary from Toby Walsh, a professor in AI at the National Information and
But there are some downsides. Bart Selman says robots will take over many of our jobs.
File photo (excluded) of humanoid robots working side by side with employees in the assembly line at a factory of Glory Ltd.
The US and I think most of the world has pushed hard on this idea of knowledge workers — you should get an education, you should educate yourself and stay ahead of the changing world. That may become actually become somewhat difficult.
It's a sudden switch, when something becomes cheaper, when the self-driving car becomes cheaper than the human driver, immediately the whole system will flip around, and say just sell self-driving cars.
When a AI-based medical doctor becomes cheaper, why not switch all medical doctors to smart computer programs and have a few remaining human specialists for very special cases.
That's sort of one of the risks that AI people are worried about. It's a societal risk. Society will have to adapt. How we will adapt is not fully clear yet. But I think it's something we'll have to think about.
Commentary from Bart Selman, a computer scientist at Cornell University.
Because of that, Michael Littman says we will have to rethink how we value people.
Because of that, Michael Littman says we will have to rethink.
What people have when people are born is this sort of ability, this is how economists think about us anyways, is that we have the ability to carry out labor.
So there's two kinds of wealth in the world, there's labor and there's capital. We aren't born with capital but we can start to amass it over time and that gives us economic power and so forth. But the only thing that we have at our disposal, at least from the beginning, is labor.
We can turn machines into workers — they can be labor, and that actually deeply undercuts human value. My biggest concern at the moment is that we as a society find a way of valuing people not just for the work they do.
We need to value each other first and foremost. Make it clear that the machines that we're talking about are machines to benefit everybody and not just the people that have them.
Commentary from Michael Littman, a computer scientist at Brown University.
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