Enterprise Artificial Intelligence Transformation

Chapter 2What Is AI and How Does It Work?

Early AI was mainly based on logic. You're trying to make computers that reason like people. The second route is from biology: You're trying to make computers that can perceive and act and adapt like animals.

Geoffrey Hinton, professor of computer science at the University of Toronto

The concept of AI is not new. Humans have imagined machines that can compute since ancient times, and the idea has persisted through the Middle Ages and beyond. In 1804, Joseph-Marie Jacquard actually created a loom that was “programmed” to create woven fabrics using up to 2,000 punch cards. The machine could not only replace weavers, but also make patterns that might take humans months to complete, and it could replicate them perfectly.

However, it was not until the late twentieth century that AI began to look like an achievable goal. Even today, artificial intelligence is not a precisely defined term. In an article published on February 14, 2018, Forbes offered six definitions, the first derived from The English Oxford Living Dictionary: “The theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.”¹ This is a reasonable place to start because the examples in the definition are the type of AI that is currently being utilized: weak or narrow AI.

The Development of Narrow AI

Computers are driven by algorithms: ...