The Three Amigos

These days, you hear a lot about Artificial Intelligence (AI) Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL), both good and bad depending on your source, and many of us immediately conjure up images of Ava from Ex Machina or a random episode from Black Mirror. However, while most people believe that it is an entirely new technology, it actually emerged in the 1950s.

Today, AI, ML and DL are present in our lives in ways that we can not even consider: Google’s voice and image recognition, Netflix and Amazon’s recommendation engines, Apple’s Siri, automatic email and text replies, and more. With data all around us, there is more information to analyse and improve these programs.

Who Are The Three Amigos?

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) analyses data and provides users with analytical results quickly. Computer systems that can perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making and translation between languages.
• Machine Learning (ML) not only analyses raw data, but it also looks for patterns in the data that can provide further insigthts. It gives computers the ability to “learn” with data, without being explicitly programmed.
• Deep Learning (DL) analyses data and data patterns, but it goes even further. The computer also uses advanced algorithms developed by data scientists, which ask more questions about the data in order to provide even more insights. Networks capable of learning unattended from unstructured or unlabelled data.

In short, Deep Learning is a subset of Machine Learning, and Machine Learning is a subset of Artificial Intelligence, which is a umbrella term for any computer program that can “think,” “behave” and do “things” as a human being can do.

Over the past decade, deep learning is being used by enterprises to solve business level challenges. From face detection to product recommendation, customer segmentation, machine translation, business intelligence, network security, and so on, the use of deep and machine learning as a process has completely transformed the world we are living today.

Here are a few ways in which artificial intelligence is already used in various industries.

Translations

Although automatic machine translation isn’t new, deep learning is helping enhance automatic translation of text by using stacked networks of neural networks and allowing translations from images.

Language recognition

Deep learning machines are beginning to differentiate dialects of a language. A machine decides that someone is speaking English and then engages an AI that is learning to tell the differences between dialects. Once the dialect is determined, another AI will step in that specialises in that particular dialect. All of this happens without involvement from a human.

Autonomous vehicles

There’s not just one AI model at work as an autonomous vehicle drives down the street. Some deep-learning models specialise in streets signs while others are trained to recognise pedestrians. As a car navigates down the road, it can be informed by up to millions of individual AI models that allow the car to act.

Ethical Challenges

Studies show that users value transparency and control. With AI users receive content bases on their patterns without knowing how and why. It is important to know that they like to be in control and understand the results / actions of AI — driven services and products.

Another issue is that the more we delegate to AI, the more we get away from understanding what and why we do things. This leads to the risk of being alienated from distilled knowledge and skills.

It’s all around you. Where will AI head next? Where will it take us? It’s hard to say. The field continues to evolve, and the next major breakthrough may be just around the corner.

It’s not artificial intelligence I’m worried about, it’s human stupidity

_{^{Neil Jacobstein}}

Technology will continue to advance and will continue to disrupt our lives in ways we cannot even imagine yet.