The Unintended Consequences of Technology

CHAPTER 4Artificial Intelligence Will Humans Soon Be Irrelevant?

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is like teenage sex: everyone wonders if their peers are doing it or if they're doing it right. Many people do not understand AI even when it's around them all the time. The voices behind Siri and Alexa are personifications of AI. Your phone and email spam filter use AI. That creepy thing when you Google a product and then it's “recommended for you” on a different site, or when Facebook suggests you might want to add someone as a friend—that's AI too. But what is AI and how does it do all that magic?

WHAT IS AI?

Artificial intelligence refers to the use of big data in machines programmed to simulate human intelligence. Computer scientists have taken another step to automate AI in a process called machine learning (ML), a subset of AI where computer intelligence (algorithms) automatically learns from experience without being explicitly programmed. They even took it even one step further to make computer systems solve complex problems, in a process called deep learning (DL). This is a subset of machine learning where artificial neural networks (algorithms), inspired by the human brain, learn from large amounts of data and use that information to solve complex problems even when using a data set that is very diverse, unstructured, and interconnected.

In the simplest form, algorithms are processes, like recipes—a set of instructions to accomplish a certain task. To oversimplify, think ...