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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
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Understanding Artificial Intelligence summary
Nicolas Sabouret
A Straightforward Explanation of AI and Its Possibilities
16 mins
Table of Contents
Understanding Artificial Intelligence
Summary of 5 key ideas
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Key idea 1 of 5
What exactly is AI?
So let’s clear something up right from the get-go: computers are machines. AI doesn’t make them intelligent. They still do no more than what we tell them to do.
Computers have come a long way, though. At first, they were just simple calculators dealing with numbers and math. Then they progressed from only numbers to dealing with words, then images, and then sound. Nowadays, we even have computers – in our smartphones, for instance – that can listen to our requests and convert them into actions.
They’re capable of all that thanks to algorithms. A simple algorithm that you used at school was the process you used to add large numbers together. You can also think of an algorithm as being like a recipe. Just as a cook knows how to follow a recipe, a computer follows the instructions in the algorithm to give you the required result.
In the early nineteenth century, Charles Babbage was the first to produce a machine capable of following algorithms. And by 1936, Alan Turing had shown that computers can, in theory at least, follow any algorithm, however complicated it might be.
So where does that leave AI, now? For starters, we probably should all be using the term AI programs rather than AI. All AI does is apply an algorithm written by a human to give responses that appear to be “intelligent.” Programmers also use AI itself to write programs using a technique known as machine learning. This is a bit of a misnomer and causes some confusion as actually, the way AI produces new programs is dependent on the quality of the data it receives. So, as has always been the case, the old adage “garbage in, garbage out” holds true.
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What is Understanding Artificial Intelligence about?
Understanding Artificial Intelligence (2021) aims to demystify the subject of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for everyone, including those who don’t have an IT or mathematical background. It will give you a basic understanding of how AI works and why sometimes it makes mistakes or offers imperfect solutions.
Who should read Understanding Artificial Intelligence?
- The AI-curious
- Nonspecialists who want to deepen their knowledge about AI
- Sci-Fi fans worried about a dystopian future ruled over by AI overlords
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