Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science that deals with machine intelligence. Its goal is to empower machines with the ability to perform routine human tasks – like seeing, listening, learning and even thinking. But Artificial Intelligence is a very misunderstood term, even in the computer world. People think “intelligent” machines will one day rule the world, and we will all be reduced to slaves. This is not necessarily the case. Let’s take a look at the field of Artificial Intelligence closely, to understand what it really is.

Artificial intelligence has been the biggest setback of the computer world. It was widely believed in the early 1970’s that by the turn of the century, we will have human-like machines, capable of making intelligent decisions and also feeling human emotions. Science fiction writers came up with all kinds of machines like “The Terminator”, which led people to believe that such machines were just round the corner. “2001: A space odyssey” that talked about the existence of such machines in the early 21st century.

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But when computer scientists actually got down to creating such machines, they realized the problem was much larger than they had imagined. Conventional computers find it very difficult to do basic things that people do. When we look at the picture of a Hyundai Accent or a Tata Indica, we have no trouble identifying it as a car. But even such a mundane task is extremely complex, and computers struggle to even recognize it as a car, let alone recognizing the make or model. Tasks which are second nature to us are, as researchers learnt to their dismay, a ...

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