What is Artificial Intelligence ?

Just over ten years ago, the IBM supercomputer program Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov—the greatest chess mind alive. That moment marked a turning point in the relationship between man and machine.

Later in 2011, the IBM Watson supercomputer defeated Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings in the US TV show Jeopardy and recently, Google’s AlphaGo beat the 2500 year old Chinese game Go.

Machines have topped the best humans at most games, including Chess, Scrabble, Othello, and even Jeopardy!! But the future of artificial intelligence (AI) is much more than games used in Digital Transformation.

Artificial Intelligence is the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior. There’s definite signs that machines with artificial intelligence will soon be taking over skilled manual work typically handled by humans. Amazon awarded $20,000 to the creators of a robot that uses Artificial Intelligence to fill orders like a human, but it’s not going to replace their employees just yet.

Online services such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft already use deep learning to identify images, recognize spoken words, and understand natural language and translate into others. Today these bg companies are making their machine learning – deep learning software – freely available to all.

Last year, Google open sourced its artificial intelligence engine TensorFlow, which the company uses for many of its own applications, including voice recognition in Android and even its flagship search engine.

Facebook open sourced designs for custom hardware, designed to run the latest AI algorithms.  China’s largest search engine, Baidu, open sourced its artificial intelligence training software. Microsoft’s Brain is now available for anyone to use in their apps. The company has open sourced the artificial intelligence framework it uses to power speech recognition in its Cortana digital assistant and Skype.

BMW, Tesla, Google are using AI for self-driving cars. Apple is also getting into this so the idea of buying a car from the same company that made your iPod may not be that far-fetched.

Many experts in the field of artificial intelligence say that it will eventually evolve far beyond all human physical and intellectual capacities.

Recently Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, raised a concern about how AI can be a threat to humanity. Even Professor Stephen Hawking warned that AI could spell the end of human race. 

But unlike the Terminator movie series with Skynet, we hope that these AI champions will be used to solve tough, real-world problems such as climate modeling and disease analysis, ultimately to the betterment of humanity.

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