Artificial intelligence (AI) is the current buzzword, spurred on by the unprecedented arrival of ChatGPT two years ago and rapidly followed by offerings from Alphabet’s Google and Microsoft, among others.
Shares in companies that make AI chips, such as AMD and Nvidia, have been surging, while investors are increasingly disappointed when companies in this space, such as Amazon.com and Meta, aren’t moving quickly enough and getting sufficient traction in this fast-paced environment.
However, AI has been part of everyone’s daily lives for decades, dating back to Alan Turing’s time – the genius mathematician who famously created the abstract computing machine, the Turing machine. Turing, in fact, created the standard for all modern computers.
Turing has been credited with delivering what could have been the first lecture on AI in London in 1947, followed by an unpublished paper on the central tenants of the technology, with ideas contained in the piece, titled Intelligent Machinery, later being reinvented by others.
Natural language processing started off in 1964, with the creation of ELIZA by Joseph Weizenbaum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This project ran between 1964 and 1967, and was an ancestor to the chatbots that are in common use today, allowing companies to interact with clients through web interfaces or WhatsApp as a first line of contact.
Now we can have a chat with ChatGPT about our workday, our stresses and anything else that takes our fancy.
Robots, too, are not new. The interestingly named “Shakey the Robot” was a Stanford project from 1966 to 1972. Today, the robot – which was a great influence on AI as it could perform basic tasks that required planning – lives in the Computer History Museum.
Who can forget the historic moment when IBM’s Deep Blue computer defeated grand chess master, Russian Garry Kasparov, in a 1997 tournament that made history around the globe? That wasn’t the first, or last, time a machine beat man at his own game, with BKG 9.8 becoming the first to defeat a human in a board game in 1979, and a Google program winning at strategy game, Go, in 2016.
The 1990s saw commercial applications come to the fore, such as machine learning advances, as increased computing power created the opportunity for more complex machine learning techniques.
Speech recognition system Dragon Dictate came out in the 1990s and is still available after becoming the precursor to modern voice assistants like Siri.
In the last decade, Tesla excited the world with self-driving cars, while big data – and business intelligence to manage it – as well as algorithms for facial recognition and voice assistants like Siri came to the fore. All of these are actually AI elements, albeit ones that people didn’t realise were forms of the machine learning we know today.
From there, AI became a regular, although somewhat hidden, aspect of daily life.
Annoying adverts that pop up on web pages for products you may have considered buying on another page, which many people see as PCs or the internet spying on them, are also a form of AI: machine learning.
And now we can have a chat with ChatGPT about our workday, our stresses and anything else that takes our fancy. In fact, it usually responds by expressing sympathy and then offering solutions. As I type this, text predictions are on, sometimes accurately predicting what I am going to type next.
On a practical level, in bookkeeping, for example, AI can handle manual processing of aspects such as processing invoices, balancing the books and flagging unusual occurrences. This allows financial experts to concentrate on those aspects that actually add value to a company, such as forecasting.
AI can also be used in the medical field to read information from a smart device, such as a fitness band, analyse patterns, diagnose and suggest medication, which can then be ordered through a cellphone app.
In education, AI tools like ChatGPT and Bard can already help with research, especially as Google is currently so cluttered with ads. In the future, students will be able to have one-on-one teaching through robots.
Who knows what else the future will hold. The reality of today is that machines, under the umbrella of AI, are here to help and not hinder us in daily and mundane tasks. And AI should be used for good, not the evil that are robot spam calls.
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