Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI): Basics, Types, Applications & Future Scope
Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
Learning Objectives
After studying this chapter, students will be able to:
• Define intelligence
• Know the features of intelligence
• • Understanding whether machines can be made intelligent
• • Know the need of Artificial Intelligence
• ● Learn the different definitions of Al by various organisations
It would be an understatement to say that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a popular topic at the moment, and it is unlikely to become any less important in the future. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has seen immense progress in recent years. The success stories of AI can be experienced in our daily lives through its many practical applications.
Al advances have enabled better understanding of images and speech, emotion detection, self-driving cars, web searching, AI-assisted creative design, and game-playing, among many other tasks; for some of these tasks machines have reached human level status or beyond.
WHAT IS INTELLIGENCE?
The term artificial intelligence stirs emotions. For one thing there is our fascination with intelligence, which seemingly imparts to us a special place among life forms. Questions arise such as "What is intelligence?", "How can one measure intelligence?” or “How does the brain work?".
All these questions are meaningful when trying to understand artificial intelligence. Philosophers have been trying for over two thousand years to understand and resolve two big questions of the universe: how does a human mind work, and can non-humans have minds? However, these questions are still unanswered.
Imagine you touch a stove and it's hot and your hand burns. Two days later, you are in front of another stove. Would you touch the stove without thinking? Or would you remember how you burned your hand and try to figure out if the stove is hot before you touch it?
Not touching the stove the second time is an example of intelligence, the ability to gain and apply knowledge and skills. Remembering that your hand was burned the first time is not intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to remember then do something based on the details of the memory.
It also turns out that intelligence has different definitions and ways to decide who or what is intelligent. There's emotional intelligence, the ability to connect with people and read their emotions. There's practical intelligence, the ability to figure out how to cook food or build a desk. Most of us think of intelligence in intellectual terms, what you know, how much you know, and how you apply your knowledge.
Intelligence is the act or quality of being clever. Using intelligence, you can see patterns, solve problems, understand a text, understand a concept, learn languages, and much more.
There is a saying, "Nothing is what it seems". A simple view of an object often does not reveal much. But when you dive deeper, you can see many layers within many layers and understand the object better. It is our brain along with our education from schools and books that allow you to dive deep into the design of objects and better understand what makes it up. Following are some definitions of intelligence:
Intelligence lets us solve problems, understand concepts and act purposefully.
• Intelligence allows us to imagine and use our experiences in life to solve problems.
Intelligence allows us to be creative and create objects and concepts of beauty and originality.
• Someone's intelligence is their ability to understand and learn things. Intelligence is the ability to think and understand instead of doing things by instinct or automatically. .
Thinking is the activity of using your brain to consider a problem or to create an idea. So, in order to think, someone or something has to have a brain, or in other words, an organ that enables someone or something to learn and understand things, to solve problems and to make decisions.
So we can define intelligence as 'the ability to learn, understand solve problems and to make decisions'.
It is now obvious that intelligence is a very helpful quality in a person. It helps you solve problems in not just school but in life too.
FEATURES OF INTELLIGENCE
Handling Incomplete Data
Interpreting complete information from incomplete data.
Handling Contradictory Data
Making sense from data having contradiction and ambiguity.
Handling Uncertain Data
Making sense from fuzzy or uncertain data.
Handling Heuristics
An intelligent system should be able to search or think using some rules to guide the search in the most probable direction.
Ability to Learn
An intelligent system has the ability to learn and slowly grow the knowledge base of the system.
It is due to intelligence that humans have emerged to be the dominant species on Earth. Humans are not the strongest or fastest or generally do not have great athletic abilities. Many animals like tigers, lions, hyenas, crocodiles, elephants, alligators, etc. are much stronger than the strongest human. Deers, tigers, cheetahs, etc. run much faster than humans. Still, the appropriate use of an intelligent mind can conquer the strongest or fastest easily.
Humans are said to be an intelligent species, so what is it that makes us intelligent?
Human intelligence, is the mental quality that consists of the abilities to learn from experience, adapt to new situations, understand and handle abstract concepts, and use knowledge to manipulate one's environment. Intelligence includes the ability to benefit from past experience, act purposefully, solve problems, and adapt to new situations.
You might be under the wrong impression that only humans have intelligence. This is NOT true. You must have seen dogs (especially in YouTube videos) that add numbers or the fact that parrots can exactly mimic the words said by a person. Chimps have also been shown to be better at some memory tasks than humans.
Elephants are good at teamwork. Dolphins are considered to be able to identify themselves in the mirror.
So, now we may ask the following question.
Can Machines be Made Intelligent?
These are questions that humans have tried to answer in the positive, ever since the computers showed up, with the effort of many brilliant and hard working scientists and engineers. The desire for intelligent machines was just an elusive dream until the first computer was developed.
The earliest computers were just computing devices. They mimicked the human ability to manipulate numbers in order to perform basic math tasks, such as addition. Logical reasoning later added the capability to perform mathematical reasoning through comparisons (such as determining whether one value is greater than another value).
However, humans still needed to define the algorithm used to perform the computation, provide the required data in the right format, and then interpret the result. The early computers could manipulate large data bases effectively by following prescribed algorithms, but could not reason about the data and information the question of whether computers could ever think. intelligent behaviour of a computer as the ability to achieve a cognitive task.
The goal of artificial intelligence (AI) as a science is to make machines do things that would require intelligence if done by humans.
What comes to your mind when you hear the word "Artificial Intelligence"?
Artificial Intelligence has always been a term which intrigues people all over the world. Artificial intelligence (abbreviated: AI or A.I.) is how Google ranks pages, Amazon knows what we like, chatbots like Siri chat, and computers play
Chess and Go. There have been at least 120 movies and web series about artificial intelligence released nationally and internationally as of today. Terminator, Her, Black Mirror, and Enthiran are just a few names that are super popular. The media industry is going gaga over AI. You can hardly avoid encountering mentions of AI today. You see AI in the movies, in books, in the news, and online.
AI is part of robots, self-driving cars, drones, medical systems, online shopping sites, and all sorts of other technologies that affect your daily life in so many ways. Much of the hype about AI originates from the excessive and unrealistic expectations of scientists, entrepreneurs, and businesspersons.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has had several false starts and stops over the years, partly because people don't really understand what AI is all about, or even what it should accomplish. A major part of the problem is that. movies, television shows, and books have all conspired to give false hopes as to what AI will accomplish.
In addition, the human tendency to give human characteristics to technology makes it seem as if AI must do more than it can hope to accomplish. So, the best way to start this book is to define what AI actually is, what it isn't, and how it connects to computers today.
Al's new milestone: Passing an eighth grade science test
Cade Metz
Four years ago, more than 700 computer sci- contest to build artificial intelligence that could pass an eighth-grade science test.
They all flunked. Even the most sophisticated sys tem couldn't do better than 60% on the test. Al couldn't match the language and log- le skills that students are expected to have when they enter high school.
But on Wednesday, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle un- velled a new system that passed the test with room to spare. It correctly answered more than 90% of the ques tions on an eighth-grade science test and more than 80% on a 12th-grade exam.
INTELLIGENT MACHINE gammon or tasks created sole ly for machines. A science test isn't something that can bem-
The system, called Aristo, is an indication that in just the past several months researchers have made significant progress in developing Al that can understand languages and mimic the logic and decl- sion-making of humans.
astered just by learning rules. Aristo's advances could spread to a range of products and services, from internet search engines to record- keeping systems at hospitals. This has significant business consequences," said Oren Etzioni, who over sees the Allen Institute. "You are going to see a whole new generation of products. some from startups, some from the big companies."
for multiple-choice tests. It took standard exams writ ten for students in New York. Researchers at the Allen Institute started work on Aristo-they wanted to build a "digital Aristotle"-in 2013. They saw standardised science tests as a more meaning ful alternative to typical AI benchmarks, which relied on games like chess and back-
Aristo was built solely
The new research could lead to systems that can car ry on a decent conversation. But it could also encourage the spread of false informa tion. "Weareat the very early stage of this," said Jeremy Howard, who oversees Fas t.al, another influential lab, in San Francisco. "We are so far away from the poten tial that I cannot say where it will end up." NYT NEWS SERVICE
'ARISTO' Passes an Eighth Grade Science Test
WHY IS THERE A NEED FOR AI?
There are more than 7 billion people who live on Earth. Out of them, about 20 % have regular access to the Internet. So, it means that the Internet deals with many petabytes of data every day. All this data can be analysed, if some capable agents are present. Another factor is that right analysis of the data can lead to greater money for the agents who are dealing with it.
For Example: Many people watch Youtube videos regularly. If you have the information that a particular person A, watches mostly specific videos or a particular type of videos, it means that creating more such videos will lead to greater profits for the filmmakers. Data is also available from departmental stores as to what goods are bought more often than others. You can always improve your products even further to have more people consume or buy your products.
Today, the amount of data that is generated, by both humans and machines, far outpaces humans' ability to absorb, interpret, and make complex decisions based on that data. Artificial intelligence forms the basis for all computer learning and is the future of all complex decision making.
As an example, most humans can figure out how to not lose at tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses), even though there are 255,168 unique moves, of which 46,080 end in a draw. Far fewer folks would be considered grand champions of checkers, with more than 500 × 1018, or 500 quintillion, different potential moves. Computers are extremely efficient at calculating these combinations and permutations to arrive at the best decision.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the basis for mimicking human intelligence processes through the creation and application of algorithms built into a dynamic computing environment. Stated simply, AI is trying to make computers think and act like humans.
Did You Know?
Elsa: Elsa (English Language Speech Assistant) is an artificial intelligent app offering professional coaching on pronunciation with a series of exercises and teaching material. The app asks your native language and programs its questions accordingly.
If you want to know the pronunciation of the specific word, just input the word and learn. ELSA's AI cares about your progress and memorizes all mistakes to make personalized lessons. Another unique feature of this AI is advanced voice recognition technology. It is supposed to teach you to speak English with true American literary pronunciation.
Various organisations have coined their own versions of defining Artificial Intelligence. Some of them are:
NITI Aayog: National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence
AI refers to the ability of machines to perform cognitive tasks like thinking, perceiving learning, problem-solving and decision making. Initially conceived as a technology that could mimic human intelligence. AI has evolved in ways that far exceed its original conception. With incredible advances made in data collection, processing and computation power, intelligent systems can now be deployed to take over a variety of tasks, enable connectivity and enhance productivity.
World Economic Forum
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the software engine that drives the Fourth € Industrial Revolution. Its impact can already be seen in homes, businesses and political processes. In its embodied form of robots, it will soon be driving cars, stocking warehouses and caring for the young and elderly.
It holds the promise of solving some of the most pressing issues facing society, but also presents challenges such as inscrutable "black box" algorithms, unethical use of data and potential job displacement. As rapid advances in machine learning (ML) increase
the scope and scale of AI's deployment across all aspects of daily life, and as the technology itself can learn and change on its own, multi-stakeholder collaboration is required to optimize accountability, transparency, privacy and impartiality to create trust
European Artificial Intelligence (AI) Leadership, the Path for an Integrated vision
Al is not a well defined technology and no universally agreed definition exists. It is rather a cover term for techniques associated with data analysis and pattern recognition. Artificial Intelligence is not a new technology, having existed since the 1950s. While some markets, sectors and individual businesses are more advanced than others. AI is still at a relatively early stage of development, so that the range of potential applications, and the quality of most existing applications have ample margins left for further development and improvement.
Encyclopedia Britannica
Artificial Intelligence is the ability of a digital computer or computer controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings. The term is frequently applied to the project of developing systems endowed with the intellectual processes that are characteristics of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalise, or learn from past experience.
The Father of Artificial Intelligence - John McCarthy
John McCarthy (1927-2011), an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist, coined the term 'Artificial Intelligence.' He was one of the founders of the discipline of AI. John McCarthy is one of the "founding fathers" of artificial intelligence, together with Alan Turing, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, and Herbert A. Simon. McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence" in 1955, and organized the famous Dartmouth conference in Summer 1956. This conference started AI as a field.
Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think like humans and mimic their actions.
RECAP...
Intelligence can be defined as a general mental ability for reasoning, problem-solving, and learning. Because of its general nature, intelligence integrates cognitive functions such as perception, attention, memory, language, or planning.
• Human Intelligence is defined as the quality of the mind that is made up of capabilities to learn from past experience, adaptation to new situations, handling of abstract ideas and the ability to change his/her own environment using the gained knowledge.
John McCarthy (1927-2011), coined the term 'Artificial Intelligence'.
Artificial intelligence is a theory and development of computer systems that can perform tasks that normally require human intelligence.
KEY TERMS
• Intelligence is defined as mental capability that involves the ability to reason, to plan, to solve problems, to think abstractly, to comprehend complex ideas, to learn quickly and to learn from experience.
• Artificial Intelligence is a technique which enables computers to mimic human behaviour.
Exercises
A. MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS.
1. Which of the following is NOT related to intelligence?
(a) It lets us solve problems, understand concepts and act purposefully
(b) It allows us to imagine and use our experience in life to solve problems
(c) It allows us to be creative and create objects and concepts of beauty and originality
(d) It helps us to act violently and wage wars
2. Due to which of these abilities have human beings emerged as the dominant species on Earth?
(a) Great strength.
(b) Great speed
(c) Great size
(d) High intelligence
3. Which of the following animals are known to be able to mimic human words?
(a) Dolphins
(B) Tiger
(c) Dogs
(d) Parrots
4. Which of these animals can identify itself when seen in a mirror?
(a) Dogs
(b) Elephants
(c) Tiger
(d) Dolphins
5. Which of the following activities involves use of Al technology?
(a) Sorting of emails into folders based on content
(b) Booting up the computer
(c) Adding up numbers using calculator
(d) Changing colored photographs into black and white
6. Which of the following is NOT true about Al?
(a) Use of Al allows business owners to earn more money
(b) Al can replace humans in clerical or repetitive tasks
(c) John McCarthy coined the term Artificial Intelligence
(d) Development of Al systems have started only in last 10 years
7. Which of the following is NOT a sign of intelligence?
(a) Solve problems
(b) Creating a poem
(c) Writing an original story
d) Taking bath
B. ANSWER THE FOLLOWING.
1. Name any three animals that are much stronger than the strongest human.
2. Give any three examples of display of intelligence in the animal world i.e. apart from humans
. 3. Define
(a) Human Intelligence
) Artificial IntelligencBear
correct answers
A. MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS
| Q. No. | Answer | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | (d) It helps us to act violently and wage wars |
Intelligence is generally defined by cognitive abilities like problem-solving and creativity, not by the act of violence. |
| 2 | (d) High intelligence |
While humans are physically weaker than many animals, our ability to think, plan, and use tools has made us dominant. |
| 3 | (d) Parrots |
Parrots possess specialized vocal organs that allow them to mimic human speech patterns. |
| 4 | (b) Elephants |
Elephants are among the few animals (along with dolphins and great apes) that pass the "mirror test" for self-awareness. |
| 5 | (a) Sorting of emails |
This uses Machine Learning to recognize patterns in text, whereas the other options are standard pre-programmed functions. |
| 6 | (d) Dev. started in last 10 years |
This is false. The field of AI was officially founded at a workshop in 1956, though it has grown rapidly recently. |
| 7 | (d) Taking bath |
Taking a bath is a routine physical hygiene task, whereas the others require cognitive processing and creativity. |
B. ANSWER THE FOLLOWING
1. Name any three animals that are much stronger than the strongest human.
* African Elephant
* Gorilla
* Grizzly Bear
2. Give any three examples of display of intelligence in the animal world.
* Problem Solving: Chimpanzees use sticks as tools to "fish" for termites in mounds.
* Communication: Dolphins use a complex system of clicks and whistles to talk to one another and coordinate hunts.
* Memory: Squirrels can remember the exact locations of thousands of buried nuts across a wide area.
3. Define:
* (a) Human Intelligence: The mental quality that consists of the abilities to learn from experience, adapt to new situations, understand abstract concepts, and use knowledge to manipulate one's environment.
* (b) Artificial Intelligence (AI): A branch of computer science that aims to create systems or machines capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and language translation.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
1. What is Artificial Intelligence in simple words?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a technology that allows machines and computers to think and work like humans. It helps systems learn from data, make decisions, and solve problems without being manually programmed every time.
2. How does Artificial Intelligence work?
Artificial Intelligence works by using algorithms, data, and models. Machines learn from examples, analyze patterns, and improve their performance over time. This process is commonly known as machine learning.
3. What are the main types of Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial Intelligence is mainly divided into three types:
Narrow AI – Designed to perform a specific task
General AI – Capable of thinking like a human (still under research)
Super AI – A future concept where machines exceed human intelligence
4. Where is Artificial Intelligence used in daily life?
Artificial Intelligence is used in many everyday applications such as voice assistants, online recommendations, navigation apps, smart phones, spam filters, and customer support chatbots.
5. Is Artificial Intelligence good or bad?
Artificial Intelligence is mostly beneficial when used correctly. It improves efficiency, saves time, and reduces errors. However, responsible use, ethical guidelines, and human control are important to avoid misuse.
6. Can students learn Artificial Intelligence easily?
Yes, students can learn Artificial Intelligence step by step. Beginners can start with basic concepts, logical thinking, and simple tools. Many online courses and educational platforms make AI learning easier for students.
7. What skills are required to learn Artificial Intelligence?
To learn Artificial Intelligence, basic knowledge of mathematics, problem-solving skills, logical thinking, and interest in technology are helpful. Programming knowledge can be an added advantage but is not mandatory at the beginner level.
8. What is the future scope of Artificial Intelligence?
The future scope of Artificial Intelligence is very bright. AI is expected to play a major role in education, healthcare, business, automation, and smart technologies, creating new career opportunities worldwide.
9. Is Artificial Intelligence safe for the future?
Artificial Intelligence can be safe if developed and used responsibly. Proper rules, transparency, and human supervision help ensure AI remains beneficial for society.
10. Why should beginners learn Artificial Intelligence?
Learning Artificial Intelligence helps beginners understand modern technology, improve career prospects, and stay prepared for future innovations in a digital world.