CAN MACHINES THINK?
Blog credits Venumadhav, 1st year
Isn’t it boring? That we need to learn some other half human language to talk to our life-less mates.
Of course we are all waiting for some fully developed technology which could talk to us just like Jarvis speaks to Tony Stark. For that to happen we need let our machines to think on their own. This thought is pretty fascinating, isn’t it? These thoughts are what paved our way towards Artificial Intelligence.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE is a branch of computer science concerned with building smart machines capable of performing tasks that typically need human intelligence.
Less than a decade after breaking the Nazi encryption machine and helping the Allied Forces to win World War II, mathematician Alan Turing changed history for a second time with a simple question: “Can machines think?”
AI is the branch of computer science that aims to answer Turing’s question affirmative by trying to stimulate or replicate human intelligence in machines.
This expensive goal of Artificial Intelligence led to a LOT of debates that there isn’t a singular definition of this field which is universally accepted. A major limitation in defining AI simply as “building machines that are intelligent” is the question what makes a machine intelligent?
Artificial intelligence falls under two broad categories:
• Narrow AI (or) Weak AI is a kind of AI that operates within limited context and is a simulation of human intelligence. Examples of this include Google search, Image recognition software, Personal assistants (Siri, Alexa).
• Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) (or) Strong AI is the kind of intelligence we were seeing in present day movies. It’s much like a human being which can apply its own intelligence without limitations.
In 2016, The first “robot citizen”, a humanoid robot named Sophia, is created by Hasen Robotics and is capable of facial recognition, verbal communication and facial expression. This is high step from Narrow AI toward AGI.