AI

What is AI? I know that when I think about it, I imagine Arnold Scwarzenegger fighting the T-2's in Terminator. Or even something like Skynet becoming self-aware and plotting how to destroy humanity and taking over the world. Well, that's what younger me would have imagined before I began studying what computers were and actually how they worked and how to program them. AI-short for Artificial Intelligence-is how we manipulate computers to get them to do things that people normally do. It enables the computer to do tasks that usually require people to act intelligently, according to Kris Hammond. It is similar I suppose to human thought in the sense that, depending on the task and the type of AI implemented, it draws upon previous stored knowledge, it processes information, and even has the ability to form new "neural" connections, meaning that it can learn. From this very top/surface level description, it has the very basics of human thought and thus is quite similar to it. I would argue to say that I suppose it is quite similar in that it goes through these stages to acquire, store, recall, and apply information. Of course the finer details will show the differences and of course it is not synonymous to human intelligence. AI does things that the human mind cannot do, like store information indefinitely with simultaneous recall without without having to overwrite data to store new information.

I think that AI's such as Deep Blue, Alpha Go, and Watson are viable proofs of intelligence. I think that they are a proof of concept that shows that we can produce computers that are capable of a some form of intelligence. I can understand why some people would look at it as a gimmick, or just a simple trick but I think it's a little more involved than that. We have smart phones that most of us are attached to. What is fascinating is that this phone seems to know us on a personal level. It knows what we are interested in, what events we would want to go to, who we want to talk to etc. All this is done through manipulating numbers and software. AI in my eyes is almost the same as this. It uses the resources it has available to it to reach a conclusion. Granted it uses math and equations and probability, but are these not the same things that we do unconsciously when evaluating what we are going to do? I think AI could be thought of as a mind. It is constantly evaluating, problem solving, has the capacity to learn, interact and also make decisions. These are things that our human minds do every day. AI is in its most basic forms, it does not have the computing capacity of a human brain quite yet. We do not yet have the resources to build an artificial human brain. But as time passes, I am sure that we will develop the tools and understanding of how the human brain works and be able to properly implement an AI that is synonymous to a human.