What is artificial intelligence? Artificial intelligence is at the forefront of technological advancement in today’s world. Mankind’s long-standing dream of creating the ultimate sidekick for almost everything and anything is slowly becoming true. These days, AI comes in all shapes and sizes. From chess-playing supercomputers to the personal assistants we’re so hung up on to autonomous cars and everything in between, artificial intelligence is in every pore of modern life. Yet, for all its presence, understanding the concept and grasp of AI is still a challenge.
What is artificial intelligence?
With so many different forms, it can be hard to understand exactly what is artificial intelligence. Simply put, it’s intelligence expressed by non-organic beings. Machines, to be precise. As humans, we perceive it as any display of “cognitive” functions based on our own minds. With non-stop advancements, the line between what is artificial intelligence and what isn’t is getting blurry. For instance, OCR (optical character recognition) was once considered AI. Today, it’s no more than a standard technology that’s taken for granted. Or chatbots – the automatic answering services for various purposes that were lame, given the whole promise of artificial intelligence. However, some have become so refined they are able to interpret complex data, with increasing use in different spheres like customer service, education and so on.
Explaining artificial intelligence is not an easy task, due to its multi-layered nature. There is much that goes with. That’s why we are opting for something different this time. Hence, a video-based post. After all, an image is worth a thousand words. A video (a bunch of moving pictures, really) is worth… a lot more. Although we like to do the talking, this time we’ll take a back seat. Enjoy.
We start off with Intel’s simple video that shows the relationship between the three most popular concepts: AI itself, machine learning and data learning. The concepts can often be confusing in terms of what is what. Thankfully, this video perfectly clears things out and does so in just under two minutes.
For many, IBM Watson is the image of AI. It can play Jeopardy, help with various healthcare treatments, education, and a number of uses. It’s a computer system that provides answers to questions posed in natural language. How does it work? The video explains that pretty well.
Google’s DeepMind department is perhaps most famous for its AlphaGo program that beat a human professional Go player for the first time in history in 2016. However, being a neural network that has the ability to mimic human short-term memory has a lot of cool applications. The network just recently taught itself to walk, run, jump or climb without any prior guidance. That’s quite impressive in our book and the video offers a behind-the-scenes look at what powers DeepMind.
Here’s a practical example of how artificial intelligence makes things better. NVIDIA recently introduced GeForce GTX G-Assist, an USB gadget. What it does is puts NVIDIA’s cutting-edge artificial intelligence in the player’s seat. With the AI-enabled player at the helm, things will go even smoother than before for incessant gamers.
Perhaps nothing shows the true power of artificial intelligence better than the artificial intelligence itself. Scientists at SONY CSL Research Lab have created the first-ever entire songs composed by AI. “Daddy’s Car” is composed in the style of The Beatles, developed from a system that learns music styles from a huge database of songs. There was some human touch such as lyrics and arrangements, but the rest is all AI: Pretty impressive, right?
Artificial intelligence doesn’t have the same power of modeling as human mind has. The concept of consciousness is rather difficult to grasp for AI and this video does its best to explain the correlation between human consciousness and AI systems and what the benefits might be.
This video shares its view on the present, future and not-so-distant future of AI. It combines standard narrative with pop culture references for an easier understanding. What’s interesting here is that artificial intelligence itself was heavily included in the making of the video. For instance, the music was created using the Jukedeck AI while some paragraphs were written by AI as well.
The Promise of AI from Andreessen Horowitz on Vimeo.
This presentation focuses more on the promise of artificial intelligence, not just the hype part of it. It’s a 45-minute walkthrough of what tech companies are doing with AI today, as well as what the research community is up to. Furthermore, the timeline for these innovations is just a few years out so it’s definitely worth a look.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference. It’s full of enlightening keynotes such as this one, where futurist Maurice Conti shows what intelligent machines can do with a few design tools.
Another TedTalks video that shows the potential danger of superintelligent AI, courtesy of neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris.
This is an entire series of lectures provided by MIT OpenCourseWare. Here, Professor Patrick Winston from MIT talks about all-things artificial intelligence. It’s an in-depth examination of what makes AI tick and really an all-around great insight into its world. If you want to spend an afternoon learning about inner machinations of artificial intelligence, look no further.
There you have it. Artificial intelligence explained through motion pictures.