The book Artificial Intelligence — A Very Short Introduction by Margaret A. Boden — review
Artificial Intelligence is one of the phenomenons nowadays. Such as every phenomenon, everyone talks about it; however, except from experts, no one really knows what it means, how it learns, how it behaves.
The book Artificial Intelligence — A Very Short Introduction by Margaret A. Boden which I am making a review of at this very document, can help to understand at least the basics of AI.
First of all, let’s give a point to the first sentence of the book which is “Artificial Intelligence seeks to make computers do the sort of things that minds can do.”. It is actually one of the most accurate and general definitions of AI.
AI is not as much complex as most people think. It is basically a machine with some sort of human features. It can be separated into 4 as thinking humanly, thinking rationally, acting humanly, and acting rationally. The models differ from each other with their main aims and principles according to the task wanted to be handled in specific situations.
The main usage of AI can also be separated into 2 as to help developments in technology field and science field. In short, AI can be used in technology to make our daily life easier and also can be used in a scientific field to help answering questions about human beings and all of nature. Thus, AI has been engaging the attraction of psychologists, neuroscientists, biologists, and philosophers (especially thinking about whether an AI system could possess real intelligence, creativity, or life) since the beginning of it’s historical timeline.
Speaking of history, we can say that, In the 1840’s Lady Ada Lovelace and in the late 1930s Alan Turing are the key names for the development of the idea of an AI system. In 1950, after 14 years from the Turing machine is invented by Alan Turing, he proposed the Turing test and manifested AI. He identified key questions about AI such as game playing, perception, language, and learning. As a result, the AI concept spread all over the World and lead to new studies.
After such studies, all the main types of AI were being thought of and also implemented by the late 1960s. Then AI got started to be divided in two as modeling a language or logical thinking and modeling purposive/adaptive motor behavior. Today, in the 21st century, it got much more complex by combining approaches since different types of problems require different types of solutions.
If we close the scientific part and focus on the philosophical view, the most common discussion is, it is artificial; but is it really an intelligence?
Turing testing which I mentioned before is a good way to obtain results for that question and also explained in the book. It is basically an experiment including one human evaluator and two responders that one of them is human and the other is a human-like machine. The point is the effort of the evaluator to notice which one of these is human and which one is not. The test’s weakness is, even if the machine responds exactly like human beings, it just covers the observable part. The zombie notation which is used in the book, fits the situation well, which is “something behaving exactly like us but lacking consciousness, so it would be passed by a zombie”.
Also, creativity is a huge discussion about AI and also mentioned in the book. Most people say that AI will never be a painter or a musician or any kind of artist. In my opinion, this topic is pointless to talk about, because of these 3 reasons. First, as we know from human evolution, the frequently used parts of the human body and also the human brain develops and the other parts which are being used less become blunt. That is why monkeys can solve puzzles based on visual memory easier and faster than humans. It is because visual memory has a key role to survive in wild nature. So, systems can develop themselves by using “that part” more frequently. The second reason is, we can say that AI can be likened to the “learning a lesson” concept from our daily lives. It basically looks at the data and learns “what will happen in which situation” just like us learning how to live by making mistakes and learning lessons from them. As a last reason, intelligence has different types. We do not expect everyone to be an artist, some of us are good at logic-based fields such as mathematics or statistics, some of us are good at analyzing or visualizing data and some of us can draw nice.
In brief, AI systems are just like us. They develop, they learn, they have intelligence types. If we human beings make art over time, then why machines will not manage to; how can we be that sure about anything about them when they are so new to the historical scene. So, I consider that topic is over-discussed due to these reasons and also the fact that AI did not promise to be able to make art already.
To sum up, Artificial Intelligence is just a type of intelligence that can make our lives easier, especially when finding a solution to a problem and the time is important; can help scientific studies with interpreting dataset; can diagnose diseases by looking for a tumor using image processing; can provide security with camera systems that can recognize faces and so on.
The alarming part is if a machine learns from human beings whiches majority is greedy, angry, arrogant, and cruel, and then acts like humans, the World can be in chaos. One of the greatest examples of that situation is “Tay” which Microsoft developed and published on Twitter just a few years ago in 2016. It learned from people and just after 24 hours of observing, it became racist and started to swear.
So, if we know how to behave well as human beings, machines can also think and behave in a good way too and they will make our lives longer, easier and healthier. Also, we all can be a part of the development of AI systems and you can start it by taking a glance at the book Artificial Intelligence — A Very Short Introduction.
