“If humans use available information, as well as reason, to solve problems to make decisions – then why can’t it be done with the help of machines?”, A question addressed by John McCarty along with Alan Turing, Allen Newell, Cliff Shaw, and Herbert Simons during the historic conference in 1956, laid the foundation stone of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Through the second half of the 21st century, remarkable advancements in technology with emphasis on computers and their storage capacity, speed, accessibility, and machine learning algorithms paved the way for excellent research.
During the 1900s and 2000s, AI thrived and one of the landmark goals of AI was achieved during the highly publicized game of chess when the world chess champion and grandmaster Gary Kasparov was defeated by IBM’s chess-playing computer program, Deep Blue. This served as a huge step towards an artificially intelligent decision-making program. Dragon Systems, in the same year, developed a speech recognition program that was implemented on Windows, a step towards spoken language interpretation. To add to the achievements of AI, Cynthia Breazeal, developed a robot, Kismet, that could recognize and display emotions, one of the major attributes of humans.
If we were to define Intelligence, it is simply a quality of the mind that enables one to use the knowledge acquired through experience, abstract concepts, and several cognitive processes. It is baffling to know that the human brain, weighing approximately 3 pounds, has a processing speed of about 1,000,000 trillion operations per second, requiring only 20 watts energy. Thus, its ability to address problems with a sense of logic, reasoning, understanding, learning, and experience is an outstanding feature.
Developing a machine having such a complex character is challenging. It is a realm that will progress slowly with extremely hard work of dedicated scientists and programmers and it is still a long journey. However, instead of aggregated intelligence, AI majorly focusses on certain aspects namely, learning, reasoning, language, perception, and problem-solving. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be broadly classified into Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI). ANI is designed to perform selective tasks such as winning a game or predetermined activity. AGI could perform logical activities like humans and ASI can generate technological advances on its own.
AI comes with great promises for the future of the humankind. It has multifaceted applications in domains across the economy, business, industries, judiciary, meteorological forecasts, medicine, and health sector to autonomous cars, image recognition. Digital assistants like Siri and Alexa are representative examples of AI. AI is popular among companies for its ability to carry out dramatic transformations across organizations. Applying artificial intelligence at work decreases the workload, thus empowering humans to upgrade their skills, also providing freedom from monotonous work and progressing towards increased creativity amongst employees. AI can perform certain tasks that pose intense risks to humans such as predicting wildfires, nuclear power plants, tackling deforestation, analyzing marine ecosystems to mention a few.
However, the disadvantages of AI can be derived from its lack of ethics. Several studies have shown that AI is unresponsive towards comprehensive thinking, motivation, sensitivity, and innovation. What comes instinctively to the brain is extremely hard for automated objects. Most researchers affirm that the AI is very unlikely to exhibit the multi-dimensional capabilities of the brain, however, it might become a risk in case it is employed for causing devastation or certain technical glitches that might overturn the benefits of AI. It is imperative to understand that the sheer intricacies and untapped potential of the brain are beyond the reach of machines.
The brain is a dimension of consciousness and many components are interwoven in its scientific description. Comparative analysis of AI and the brain indicate an unbridgeable gap and the right perspective would be collaborating their attributes. The researches should be primarily focused on enhancing productivity through the integration of AI with human intelligence within the broad restrictions of sensibilities. A complementary environment for both will surely give rise to opportunities in numerous realms.
