Artificial intelligence: What is it, how does it work, what are its current impacts?

In this article we will delve deeper into these issues, defining its concept, presenting its functions in our lives and, above all, reflecting on how its advancement impacts human existence, both in the technological field and in the ethical and social fields.

Understanding the origin of the term Artificial Intelligence

Even though we are not yet familiar with the subject, which is still a novelty, Artificial Intelligence has its origins many decades ago, more precisely after the Second World War. In this post-war period, the English mathematician Alan Turing published an article called ” Computing Machinery and Intelligence ” and in this text he questioned, through some tests, the capacity of machines to be intelligent.

His test, also known as The Imitation Game , or Turing test, aimed to measure the ability of a machine to exhibit intelligent behavior that matched ours. For those who wish to better understand this part of the article, there is a film called The Imitation Game , from 2014, that tells this whole story.

In 1956, years after the publication of Turing’s article, Professor John McCarthy brought the term to life, referring to the ability that machines could have to solve problems that were previously only solved by humans.

A few years later, another essential term in this field of study was introduced: Machine Learning, which gives computers the ability to learn by simply feeding an algorithm with data, and the computer would then be able to perform functions automatically. This is one of the first and greatest advances in AI.

ELIZA, who are you?

To conclude this short chronology, we come to 1964, and with it the creation of the first chatbot, the ELIZA software, a creation of the American computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT. ELIZA chatted automatically using responses based on keywords and semantic and syntactic structure that is widely used in today’s world.

After all, what is Artificial Intelligence?

The answer in theory is simple, and can be summed up in the following line of reasoning: AI is an intelligence identical to human intelligence, but built on the basis of technological tools, and its objective is to carry out actions that, if carried out by humans, would be considered intelligent.

An AI has the ability to learn and decide, according to a rational perspective, which path to follow in a given action. It only needs to have all the necessary algorithms and data inserted in it for that path to be a valid rational option.

Thus, a machine learns and performs an action, but is not yet able to reflect on it. And this is where we come back to the beginning of the article, and the scene from the movie AI: will we one day have thinking, reflective machines, and most importantly, machines with emotions? This is a trend and also an area of ​​AI study that comes as an evolution of ANI – Weak Artificial Intelligence , a concept that we have already described in another article.

And how does an AI work?

AIs work in such a way that they simulate human intelligence perfectly. Their goal is to be able to respond to diverse demands, ranging from suggesting new films to a user of a certain streaming service, to helping consumers in an appliance store who are having after-sales problems.

It is impossible to think about our daily lives without coming across forms of artificial intelligence that are visible to our eyes. We can see it in the spell checker on our cell phones, in the shopping suggestions we receive via email or on social media. Speaking of social media, it is incredible how our news feed often seems tailored to our tastes.

Well, it is in fact made especially for you, through AI, after analyzing all the information that you unknowingly leave behind on the internet.

That said, it is easy to understand that AI works through:

• Structures used to process, divide, catalog, organize and analyze data through a data model;
• Big Data, that is, the provision of large volumes of data;
• And finally, the system’s ability to process information in order to choose the most appropriate action to take.

Machine Learning

The idea behind the concept of Machine learning is literal, that is, machine learning, which means that it will analyze all the data in its system and will learn to make decisions that match the functions it was assigned.

Let’s take as an example an AI that captures a user’s click on a baby diaper website. The system will analyze the entire path taken by the user, then combine it with the entire database it has and from there make the decision, correct from the point of view of its function, to suggest a series of websites, stores and baby products to this user.

And what normally happens in cases like this: the user ends up consuming more products from the niche, making the customer acquisition process successful, and largely due to the Artificial Intelligence that detected, gathered information, and presented specific suggestions for that potential customer.

Thus, Machine Learning is an area of ​​AI that affirms the thesis that systems learn from data and thus identify patterns and, consequently, are able to perform actions and make choices with minimal human intervention.

Deep Learning

Deep Learning is a subfield of machine learning that uses multiple layers of data and knowledge to reproduce a human neural network as faithfully as possible, and thus teach the computer how to understand and then predict certain patterns.

Deep Learning is an area that is inspired by the way our brain absorbs information and learns, which is why it is seen as a reproduction of our mechanism for thinking and choosing actions. We can conclude that Deep Learning is the closest we can get to imitating human intelligence in computers and its applications cover several areas, such as:

• Voice recognition
• Image processing
• Natural language rocessing

Artificial Intelligence in today’s world

With the inevitable advancement of technology, it is a fact that at some point we will come closer to the scenario described at the beginning of the article, where AI will be so advanced that it will look more like human systems. This scenario brings us to a series of reflections that, until now, only we, humans, can make.

What will be the limits of AI in the evolution of the world? The Battlestar Galactica series ends up offering one of these apocalyptic scenarios, which are more possible. In the plot, we have a context where technology has advanced to such an extent that the artificial intelligence used by humans has gained the status of a life form and self-awareness; however, this AI ends up rebelling against its creators because they feel that they are not valued by the human race.

Could it be that, as we advance in this area and seek to create machines with all our characteristics, we do not run the risk of being overtaken by them?

There is also the question of what are the limits of Artificial Intelligence. Will we ever have a machine that can not only simulate, but actually feel human emotions? And if that happens, even if it is hypothetical, what will be the line that defines what is human and what is machine?

AI emerges as a means of improving the functionalities of our era, and creating situations of convenience, ease and well-being for us, humans. When we come across an email offering exactly the product we were thinking of buying, the first action we usually take is to click on the suggestion and often buy that product.

What we fail to think about in cases like this is the lack of privacy and the tenuous security we currently have with our data. The case of the English company that used data from Facebook users to capture the mood of the British and thus offer material about England’s exit from the European Union is an example of the side effects that the use of AI can bring to our society.