Will Artificial Intelligence take over the world? Will it take away our jobs? Can it solve all of humanity’s problems? These are questions I hear quite often. In this article, I am going to share 5 things you need to understand about AI before you panic.
AI Gets Better With More Data
The more data you have, the better AI can get at sifting through it. Which raises the question: If one company has access to a lot of data, and another doesn’t, can we predict which one will have better Artificial Intelligence?
AI Is All About How Well You Can Define The Problem
: Data isn’t generally very organized or structured. The solution? Experts need to be able to describe what they’re looking for in a way that the computer will understand. This is the stage where most problems with AI begin — when programmers try to define the problem, but either don’t know enough about the subject matter or aren’t clear enough about how they want their system to behave.
Machine Learning Doesn’t Mean We’re Teaching Robots To Think For Themselves
What we often think of as “learning” — building up knowledge from experiences and interactions with others — isn’t what computers do when they learn. Machine learning refers to algorithms that are capable of finding patterns in data and making predictions based on those patterns without explicit instructions on how to do so. Computers aren’t really “learning” anything — they’re simply using statistics and pattern recognition to identify things like faces
AI Is Not “Alive”
The most basic thing to understand about AI is that it’s not alive. It’s a set of instructions written by humans, and it exists only as long as there’s a machine running the code. Once the machine is switched off, so is the AI.
AI Is Racist, Sexist And Biased
AI learns from whatever data you feed it — and humans are full of bias and prejudice. So if you give an AI biased data, it will learn those biases and act on them. In July 2015, Google Photos labeled black people as gorillas; in 2016, Microsoft released a chatbot that tweeted racist slurs within days of going online; in 2017, Amazon had to take down its new recruiting tool after discovering it was biased against female candidates.
AI Is Not Necessarily Better Than Humans At Everything
As with anything else in life, there are things at which humans excel and things at which we’re surpassed by machines. For example, human beings are better than computers at recognizing faces unless you’re Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (his phone allegedly doesn’t recognize his face). Computers are better at doing repetitive tasks such as predicting whether someone will default on a loan or designing a bridge that
AI Won’t Take Over Your Job Computers
Are Super Good At Math
Welcome to the future, where everything is AI, and AI is everything.
Maybe you’re a little apprehensive about this future. Maybe you’ve seen some sci-fi movies that have scarred you for life, or maybe you just read an article about how AI will take over all our jobs and leave us sitting around doing nothing for the rest of our days.
Don’t worry — there’s no reason to panic yet. Here are a few things to keep in mind when trying to understand what artificial intelligence is (and isn’t) capable of right now.
AI Won’t Take Over Your Job Computers
Computers Can Learn Some Things Really Well
Computers Have A Long Way To Go
AI Isn’t About Making One Computer Smarter Than Us
Experts in artificial intelligence have been warning us for years that AI is going to be a huge deal: one that will upend our world, change the way we work and play, and even threaten our very existence.
They aren’t wrong, but they are missing some important points about how AI works and what the implications of it are for our future. Misinformation out there about the capabilities and limitations of machine learning could lead to bad decisions, false expectations and unnecessary fear.
To help you cut through some of the noise, here’s a look at some common AI myths.
AI Isn’t About Making One Computer Smarter Than Us
We’re often led to believe that the goal of AI research is to make one computer smarter than all of humanity combined — a singularity point where machines surpass human intelligence and then use it against us. That’s not what any serious researcher is talking about or working on. Instead, it’s about making computers better at specific tasks.
Right now, these tasks tend to be ones where humans excel, such as language translation (Google Translate), image recognition (Google Photos) and driving cars (Google’s self-driving vehicles). The thinking behind these projects is that if we can teach computers to do things humans do, we can also
I think it’s important to question what you read. If a company or manufacturer really is using AI, it’s in their interest for you to think of them as doing so. After all, what does their reputation matter if the product works? You shouldn’t blindly trust everything you read, but also don’t panic before all the facts are in. And if you’re going to get agitated about AI taking over the world and killing us all… well, maybe take some time to read something else instead.
