Artificial Intelligence or Machine Intelligence is something that you will hear talked about often in computer sciences. You will also hear about AI in Science Fiction books, of course. Here, you get robots and spaceships that think and talk like people. Indeed, most of the AI machines in Science Fiction are reputed to have minds that are better than those of human beings. So, what is Artificial Intelligence and is it that far fetched a concept?
What is Artificial Intelligence?
The term Artificial Intelligence is used to refer to computer systems that closely simulate the intelligence processes that are found in human beings. These processes include learning, reasoning and self awareness.
Artificial Intelligence Examples
There are already many examples of AI systems out there. Of course, the human race is still far from designing a computer that is self aware, but the following are a few of the examples of Artificially Intelligent systems;
- Software that is used to filter spam
- The keyword suggestion feature in Google
- Sales forecasting systems
- Personal Assistance such as Google Now, Siri and Cortana
- IOT devices
Again, the defining thing about these computer systems is their ability to learn and to take action based on what they have learnt from their environments. Google, as an example, learns about the keywords that people are using when making queries on the platform. Now, whenever someone begins to type something into Google Search, Google shows suggestions that are based on the queries that have already been made on the platform by other people.
Are AIs self Aware
This is something that we have already tried to answer above. In reality, the AIs that are there today can hardly be described as intelligent. Indeed, they are far from becoming the self aware creations of the Science Fiction world. Although some computers are capable of learning, this learning is limited to the scope of their programming. Artificial Consciousness is, therefore, still far from being achieved.
