Surfing the Tsunami: Chapter 2: What is AI Up To These Days?

   

In this chapter we focus on the four A's: Autos, Advice, Automation, and Analysis. Lets first focus on Autos. AI has come a very long way since it was first introduced. First it was strictly in coding and did only what the code told it to do. Now it is more advanced and learning from its mistakes. AI is becoming so advanced that we have started using it in automobiles. The chapter discusses the complexity of teaching a car to drive and analyzes the challenges associated with processing and analyzing vast amounts of data, similar to how the human brain functions while driving. Google is mentioned as one of the companies working on self-driving cars, utilizing machine learning algorithms to analyze images and make decisions.

  

The second A is for Advice. AI plays a significant role in everyday society. AI impacts activities like shopping and information searching. How does this work? AI will read and store your search information to give you similar ads when you are on the internet. For example whenever I am scrolling through Facebook I get ads for the item that I was searching for. You can even talk to AI to get advice. Two AI systems that come to mind are Siri and Alexa. They both do that same thing but owned by different companies. You can ask them anything and as long as they have learned an answer to your question they will answer it. If you have any AI device try asking them what the weather is going to be on a certain date.

The next A we have is for Automation. AI has been around for a while now in this fashion. It has been used in a physical sense and virtual sense. Automation has been visibly prominent in the physical world, particularly in manufacturing, where robots have been used for routine actions. With advancements in programming, robots have become capable of more complex tasks within the manufacturing process. The automation of physical processes heavily relies on hardware, especially computer chips. The virtual AI is fully digital. For example using a spreadsheet to do all of your calculations. This helps many businesses with organization of their budgets and many other things. Both physical and virtual automation AI will be very useful to every business, but at the same time many people are freaking out that AI will replace them at work. We will have to wait for the future to see how AI gets used more in the workplace.

    

The last A is for Analysis. Analysis can be very complex when it comes to AI. Analysis can occur in various contexts, such as autonomous vehicles, home shopping advice, speech recognition, and process automation. The main goal of analysis is to assist in decision making. This will help someone in making the correct decision. This can be compared to a maze where there are multiple paths to follow, but each path does have certain consequences. The goal of reaching a specific outcome drives the decision-making process.

There are many new advanced tools that will contribute to our growing society using AI. Many people are scared for what AI can bring to the table and rightly so. I am optimistic that AI will help society in a positive way and I look forward to what the future of AI will bring. Stay tuned for my next blog where I will try to use an AI voiceover on this blog post.

References - Surfing the Tsunami