All About Artificial Intelligence

Although the term “Artificial Intelligence” may seem pretty self-explanatory, in fact, it is very hard to pinpoint its exact definition. The short definition is that AI is “simulating human intelligence in machines”, meaning that it should mimic human thinking patterns and actions. It is still very vague, but in the case of this particular field, an exact definition is hard to come by. It’s partly due to the very nature of Artificial Intelligence and how our rapidly advancing technology tends to shift the goalpost of what exactly do we deem as “intelligence”. For example, at one point reacting to and recognizing writing was considered to be the goal of AI, while nowadays it is something we expect from more advanced machines. The goalpost shifted again to “beating a human in chess”, then in Go, and so on.

And so, although we already use things that could be categorized as a sort of artificial intelligence, we still can’t fully agree on a definition of AI as a whole. Currently, when people use the term AI, they usually mean some of its subsets: deep learning and machine learning, which are both very specific ways in which AI principles are applied to process data. They can also mean something called ANI, Artificial Narrow Intelligence. This means an AI that is programmed and trained to perform a very specific, concrete set of tasks. An example of that can be iPhone’s Siri, Google search engine, or even a spam filter on your e-mail inbox. The other two types are vaguer and less attainable: the AGI, Artificial General Intelligence that can be complete more complex tasks without human help, and ASI, Artificial Super Intelligence - which would be more intelligent than a human brain - that for now is just the stuff we can see in sci-fi media.

Despite its vague definition, AI is already being used to improve our life. For example, it is used by car-sharing services to calculate the best path and most reliable ETA, to help automatic vacuum cleaners calculate the best path through a room, and e-mail filters use it to recognize and block spam and viruses just as fast as hackers can come up with them. In this seminar, you can learn the history of AI and how it can help revolutionize the future.