Artificial Intelligence

Are Computers Intelligent?

After attempting the previous quiz, you would have realized the answer to this question. Let’s have a look at it again:

Computers are used to:

1. Store information in their memory like documents, images, and videos, which you can access immediately.
2. Run programs that interact with the user to help solve his problems like going calculations, etc.
3. Play games.
4. Watch movies and videos.
5. Surf on the Internet.

In all the above examples, the task is defined and computer run programs to get the result. E.g., while watching movies, the computer reads the file from the hard disk and displays it on the screen using a video player.

This is not termed as intelligence because there is no learning process involved in this. Computers are just following some set of predefined instructions. 

But when computers are equipped with a program that learns and acts based on their environment, they can be termed as intelligent.

Let’s see some examples:

1. Self Driving Cars: They can recognize their environment and act accordingly.
   
2. Emotion Identifiers: They can identify the emotion of the human using their knowledge. 
   
3. AI Bots In-Game: They can play the game as if a human is playing.
   
4. Alexa or Homepod (Siri): It recognizes what you say and reacts accordingly.
   

In all of the above cases, the computer uses its knowledge to get information and act accordingly.

Artificial Intelligence – Definition

Artificial Intelligence is the study and design of intelligent agents (computers) which have the ability to analyze the environments and produce actions which maximize success.

A computer is termed as intelligent if it has the ability for gathering information, analyzing it to make decisions, and acting to complete a task automatically with very little to no human intervention.

Advantage of AI

There are many advantages that an AI machine has over humans. Some of them are:

1. Speed of execution: Computers have better memories. They can be fed a large amount of information and can retrieve it almost instantaneously. While a doctor makes a diagnosis in ~10 minutes, an AI system can make a million in the same duration. 
2. They are not lazy: Computers don’t require sleep the way humans do. They can calculate, analyze, and perform tasks tirelessly and round the clock without wearing out.
3. Accuracy: Computers have a very high accuracy in some tasks.
4. Less Biased: Computers are not affected or influenced by emotions, feelings, wants, needs, and other factors that often cloud our judgment and intelligence.

Conclusion

In this topic, we learned how to identify which computer is intelligent and which is not and what Artificial Intelligence is. We also saw what advantages AI and machines, in general, have over humans.

In the next topic, we will look at the various application of AI.