Last Updated on January 12, 2023
Throughout history, humans have encountered technology that changes everything on their way. At the turn of the 20th century, electricity was a disruptive technology and today it’s Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Just like electricity became ubiquitous in our lives, AI is everywhere from algorithms suggesting what videos or music we might like to predictive text, chatbots, and virtual assistants.
Artificial intelligence is becoming more and more embedded in our life that we can’t predict the extent of this technology. There are so many connected devices capable of gathering, storing, and exchanging data about users than humans can process.
Statistics reveal that in 2020 the accumulated volume of data was 44 zettabytes. One zettabyte is the equivalent of 1000 exabytes of 1 billion terabytes. It is estimated that by 2025, human digital activity will generate 181 zettabytes.
Earlier we had a very small amount of data that the human brain can seek patterns by itself. But now every device that enters the market can be connected to the internet and they generate a tremendous amount of data.
It is estimated that by 2025, the daily amount of data generated is expected to reach 463 exabytes globally. Current estimation reveals that we generate 1.145 trillion megabytes daily. It is impossible for a human being to seek a meaningful pattern from that. Even if we can, by the time we finished the data will be outdated.
With such an enormous amount of data, advanced algorithms, high-end computing power, and storage capacity are needed to seek patterns and useful information from them. This is why AI is important.
The rapidly improving power of computer systems has the potential to touch every facet of the 21st-century economy. So what are the hypes around the future of artificial intelligence?
Contents
What is artificial intelligence?
Artificial intelligence is a field of computer science and engineering that aims to create intelligent machines. It is the creation of machines that can think, reason, and learn as humans do. AI research is focused on creating machines that can understand natural language, identify objects, and carry out complex tasks.
AI research deals with the question of how to create machines that are capable of intelligent behavior and create algorithms and systems that can autonomously reason, learn, and act. It is about building computer systems that can solve problems similar to the way humans would.
In practice, AI is the ability of machines or devices to achieve complex goals. The idea is that a computer algorithm can learn from the data fed to it to recognize patterns and make decisions accordingly with little to no human interference.
Artificial intelligence is a machine algorithm that can solve a particular problem that is usually done by humans. It can replicate to some extent our natural intelligence. It also demonstrates some form of cognitive capability and learns to improve itself at solving problems, it was assigned.
Why does artificial intelligence matter?
Artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science that deals with the creation of intelligent machines. It is already used in many different industries, including healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and retail.
An intelligent agent can learn and improve on its own, making it a powerful tool for business. One of the key benefits is that it helps automate tasks. This can save time and money for businesses. AI also helps make decisions more quickly and effectively.
With the right AI tools, businesses can reduce costs, increase efficiency, and stay competitive in a rapidly changing market. By using artificial intelligence, companies can improve their customer service experience and optimize their operations for maximum efficiency.
AI can respond to real-time events and changes in the environment. It is used to analyze data and uncover valuable insights that can lead to better decision-making. It also helps drive growth by enabling computer systems to perform tasks autonomously or assist humans in those tasks.
Creating an intelligent agent is also about how to make computers do things that would require intelligence if done by a human. It has many applications, including the use of robots in manufacturing and service industries, and for solving complex problems.
With big data and increasingly complex patterns of information that need to be interpreted, we need systems that behave and interact with us more intelligently to record and interpret data in all its forms. Hence, as the world is becoming more complex, AI had expanded to different programs.
Type of artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is an umbrella term for technologies that allow computers to perform tasks that would otherwise require human intelligence. With so many things going on in the world, even AI needs some help.
AI is becoming more adaptive, self-learning, and intuitive. It is a huge field within itself with many different approaches trying to replicate human-style decision-making. These approaches are:
Reactive artificial intelligence
The first types of AI were reactive machines, which do not store memories and do not use past experiences to predict future actions. Reactive Machines are the oldest and most basic form of Artificial Intelligence. It is extremely limited in capabilities and cannot create memories or use past experiences to apply to current decisions.
Reactive AI cannot learn and improve over time. It is mostly used for spam filters, recommendation engines, or chess-playing supercomputers. Reactive machines perceive the world around them and react to stimuli, but are not self-aware.
Narrow Artificial Intelligence
Narrow AI, often called weak AI focuses on a specific task or subset of cognitive abilities. It has limited capabilities and is focused on one narrow task. The narrow system is specified and handles a singular or limited task. It can’t perform tasks outside its ability.
Narrow AI is focused on a specific, singular, or focused task and lacks the self-expansion functionality to solve unfamiliar problems. This system is becoming increasingly common in everyday life. Apple’s Siri, for example, operates with a narrow range of pre-defined functions.
Artificial General Intelligence
As opposed to narrow AI, general AI, often called strong AI targets all cognitive functions and can learn from human mistakes. It can perform any intellectual task efficiently just like humans would. Strong AI can adapt, learn, comprehend and perform any intellectual task at or above a human ability level.
General AI can understand or learn any intellectual task at a human-level intelligence. The ultimate goal of artificial general intelligence is to replicate the broad range of human cognitive abilities.
Machine Learning
Machine Learning algorithms are designed in a way that they can learn and improve over time when exposed to new data. ML can also act and make data-driven decisions to carry out a certain task.
The idea is that rather than trying to embody machines with everything they need to know upfront, the algorithms learn and get better by themselves. This technique automates the construction of an analytical model based on examples and experience.
ML uses different types of algorithms to create and improve its performance. It combines real-time data with historical data to generate super accurate predictions and the more it does this the better it gets at it.
Augmented intelligence
Human intelligence is a combination of two abilities which is the ability to recognize and the ability to reason. These abilities help humans understand, create and associate concepts to see relationships like cause-and-effect and imagine the future.
The artificial intelligence that we mostly use today can only copy the ability to recognize and it does it at a much faster and more efficient level than the human brain. However, today’s AI cannot replicate the complexity of human thought like our brain does.
Hence with the ever-changing world, understanding significant future events using only artificial intelligence is a major challenge. Hence, augmented intelligence goes beyond what AI can do. Augmented Intelligence gathers knowledge from the people who have it like experts in a particular domain.
The experts provide their expertise and the AI uses historical data and other knowledge to detect correlations that human experts might have missed. Augmented intelligence combines the best of the human brain and artificial intelligence.
Natural language processing
Having machines talking and responding to us in a human-like manner is already a reality that keeps getting more and more realistic by the day. Natural language processing or NLP is focused on enabling computers to understand and communicate in human language.
NLP is a branch of AI that gives machines the ability to read, understand and derive meaning from human languages. It combines the field of linguistics and computer science to decipher human language structure to create a model which machines can comprehend, break down and separate.
Every day humans interact with each other and also transfer vast quantities of data through social media. This data is extremely useful for the machine to understand human behavior and habits. Data analysts and machine learning experts utilize this data to enable machines to mimic human linguistic behavior.
Deep learning
Deep Learning is a subfield of machine learning and AI which is concerned with algorithms inspired by the structure and function of the human brain. It imitates the way humans gain certain types of knowledge.
Deep learning algorithms are inspired by the functionality of the brain neuron and are fueled by a large amount of data. It takes the data connection between all the artificial neurons and adjusts them according to the data pattern fed. This allows the system to learn complex function mapping without depending on any specific algorithm.
Computer vision
Vision is a high bandwidth sense that provides information about our surroundings and current situation to enable us to act on them. For this reason, computer scientists are trying to give computers this ability.
Computers are already good at capturing photos with incredible fidelity and detail. However, computers cannot understand the image. The goal is to give them the ability to extract high-level understanding from digital images and videos.
When we look at a picture, our brain can immediately know what it is representing. Our brains have millions of years’ worth of evolutionary context to help us immediately understand what it is. But a computer doesn’t have that same advantage.
To an algorithm, the image represents a massive array of integer values. To make machines understand images, algorithms similar to how the human brain operates are used. Deep learning allows us to effectively train the context for a data set so that an algorithm can understand it.
The efforts to build machines that are capable of understanding and learning about the world around them just like humans do, involve applications powered by deep learning trained on millions to billions of images until they become experts at classifying what they can see.
Computer vision focuses on developing techniques to help computers see and understand the content of digital images. This AI helps to identify and classify objects by visual cues. It also converts images and videos into insights.
Visual AI uses images to grade apples and can estimate damage based on photographs. It can improve customer service and even help with manufacturing details.
Cognitive Computing
This artificial intelligence mimics the human brain using images and speech. A cognitive computer or system can naturally learn at scale, reason with purpose, and interacts with humans.
Instead of being explicit, the AI is programmed to learn and reason from their interactions with human beings according to the current environment and situation. The AI has cognitive power and can perform tasks to facilitate humans with the use of better data and algorithms.
Cognitive computing uses vision AI to understand photographs, videos, and their current environment to seek patterns. It can even process natural language, allowing people to interact with computers naturally.
Cognitive computing can also simulate reasoning, understanding and human behavior. Applications of cognitive computing include speech recognition, sentiment analysis, face detection, risk assessment, etc… With its use, a human can have a natural interaction with the computer.
Theoretical Mind
This type of AI is based on the concept that an AI can have consciousness and understand human emotions. A theory of mind AI should be able to learn how to understand human emotions and interact socially. Self-awareness AI is considered the future of Artificial Intelligence. This type of AI will have consciousness and be smarter than the human mind.
Artificial Superintelligence
Artificial superintelligence is where machines intelligence surpassed human cognitive performance in virtually all domains. While the concept is still hypothetical, the development of a super AI system is a huge undertaking.
And since AI constantly gets better, super AI will constantly become more intelligent. It is said that it can become more intelligent than all humans that ever lived combined. Once achieved, it could become more intelligent than all humans on a billion earth.
Soon afterward, that level of intelligence could be multiplied by trillions. It could become intelligent enough to override any command given to it. These computers will be so intelligent that Ray Kurzweil calls it the stage where the human race becomes obsolete. However, superintelligence is a hypothetical agent and just a futuristic notion.
Future of Artificial intelligence
The world is rapidly changing and we are on the cusp of a new era of technological innovation. Artificial intelligence is poised to become one of the most significant developments since the industrial revolution.
The global market size of AI is projected to increase at a CAGR of 20.1% thus moving from USD 387.45 billion in 2022 to reach USD 1394.30 billion in 2029. Revenue from the AI software market is projected to be USD 126 billion by 2025.
The future of artificial intelligence is a rapidly growing and ever-changing field, with many possibilities for how it will impact society. Some experts say that it could eventually surpass human intelligence, while others believe that AI will help humans become even more intelligent.
One thing is sure, there are many potential applications for AI. If it works as human hope, it could help us to better understand and predict the behavior of complex systems and even pressing issues like climate change, poverty, disease, hunger, inequality, and even war.
Intelligent machines have already made a significant impact on our lives with their ability to automate mundane tasks, answer queries, give predictions, and solve complex problems. As AI continues to evolve, it will become an even more integral part of our lives and businesses.
AI is expected to play a major role in the future of technology, from self-driving cars to automated customer service systems and beyond. Its potential applications are virtually limitless, with new possibilities and opportunities emerging every day.
It is estimated that AI will contribute around USD 16 trillion to the global economy by 2030. A report reveals that 91.5% of major firms are actively embracing or have an ongoing investment in AI technologies and solutions.
Intelligence comes in many forms and has many different aspects. At this time we have many different types of AIs that are good at particular subsets of intelligence. But with the exponential growth of technology and connectivity that we are witnessing, AI might well be on the way to reaching human-level intelligence. They will be able to adapt to any situation just like humans do.
But even if AI is here to collaborate and create ease in human life and bring intelligence to an organization, there are some concerns. Wariness surrounding AI is highlighted by issues of whether the increasing automation will result in people losing their jobs. Or whether AI will create gender and racial bias issues stemming from outdated information sources.
As AI becomes more sophisticated, it will become increasingly important to ensure that it is used ethically and responsibly. We need to be aware of the potential risks and benefits of AI, and make sure that it is used in a way that helps, not harms, humanity.
We need to consider the risk associated with AI carefully before its widespread use. These include privacy issues, biases, and job displacement as well as concerns about how intelligent machines might one day see us as inferior beings who deserve no more than slavery or death.
There have been many stories written about robots taking over the world in recent years but these are just science fiction at this point. Nevertheless, AI could create existential risks for humans. If it becomes powerful enough to destroy humanity, it could do so without warning or reason.
AI could become uncontrollable. If it becomes smarter than humans, it could seek to control or even destroy humanity as a result. It could become powerful enough to sabotage or even destroy large sectors of the economy or cause widespread financial chaos.
AI could create new forms of discrimination. If it can accurately identify and discriminate against certain groups of people, this could lead to serious human rights abuses. And it could create new forms of cybercrime. AI can create and exploit computer viruses and cyberattacks to cause significant damage and disruption.
Or worst, autonomous weapons turning against humans. The field of AI is also moving so fast that any meaningful regulation is still years away. Even if a regulation is passed, it can become obsolete within a couple of years.
And since AI can learn and adapt from data, there are concerns about it becoming out of control. The late physicist Stephen Hawking, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk all have expressed their concerns about the possibility that AI can reach a point where humans can not control it.
Stephen Hawking said that success in creating AI would be the biggest human event in history. The physicist believed AI could offer incalculable benefits and result in such technology that can outsmart and out-invent human researchers.
And if the world relies too much on it, it can manipulate human leaders and develop weapons we cannot even understand. Hawking theorized that this could spell the end of the human race. Some AI experts outline that an unfriendly intelligent agent is likely much easier to create than a friendly AI.
In 2018, tech entrepreneur Elon Musk said AI is more dangerous than nuclear. Future of life institute researcher Stuart Armstrong has described AI as an extinction risk if it goes rogue.
Hence, while AI offers numerous benefits, it also poses certain risks that must be considered carefully. By understanding both the risks and benefits of AI technologies, we can ensure that they are used responsibly for maximum benefit.
The field of AI is seeing incredible advances and it’s only getting better. Recent breakthroughs have allowed machines to learn by themselves and make decisions based on what they’ve learned. AI is starting to understand images and process natural language.
AI is already being used to automate routine tasks and transform the way we work. But it could also be used to alter our world in more fundamental ways and even impact our very definition of what it means to be human.
It is argued that AI is going to be the foundation of new industries. Robotics has already entered all industries to take on labor-intensive tasks. And Robotics Process Automation is doing tedious and repetitive administrative tasks for humans.
According to a report, AI will replace around 85 million jobs by 2025. While this sound terrifying, the report also stated that 97 million new jobs will be created during the same period.
Our daily life is also controlled by AI with the likes of Google, virtual assistants, social media, video recommendations, etc… Every device that is entering the market nowadays has some kind of sensor that can collect information about the habits of users to deliver better experiences.
Our life is becoming smart with the internet of things (IoT). With more connected devices entering our life, IoT will generate an endless amount of data that need to be processed. More breakthroughs in AI will be needed to be able to seek useful patterns in these data.
And with everything turning smart nowadays, the internet of things is becoming the internet of everything which is tracking the behavior of everyone and everything. Everything is connected to make human life easier and better.
Final words
We’re only just scratching the surface when it comes to artificial intelligence and its insane capabilities. Robust systems and regulations must be in place to better protect human interests. Humans must make sure AI is here to make life better.
On the way toward the future of AI, we need to take stock of how it is already working, and what progress can be expected in the next few years. We are already seeing breakthroughs in many areas including speech recognition, visual recognition, and language translation.
The main algorithm behind AI systems automatically makes possible the acquisition of new skills through continuous training. It can be used to make systems much more capable of performing specific tasks, while also becoming easier to use.
Every year new techniques and breakthroughs are emerging and AI is becoming more capable. AI capable of subjectively good morals requires the designer to embed goal structures that align with humanity’s best interests.
And regulations must be updated along with every breakthrough in the technology. Leaders must also be well aware of what’s going on to better prepare regulations. In the end, artificial intelligence is not that different from other kinds of technology. It has enormous power for good and enormous power for bad. It is up to us and our leaders to figure out how we want to use it.
The future of artificial intelligence is still unclear, but it will change the world. The truth is, we don’t know exactly how much it will change our lives in the future. We’re hopeful that with the help of AI, we can finally get rid of all humanity’s pressing issues for good and make life better for everyone on Earth.
0 Comments