The Rise Of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence or simply AI is defined in Oxford dictionary as

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 -Ref-

The idea behind AI is to make a machine which can think and work like human brain and this is achieved via Neural Networks. Neural networks means to model a machine based on human brain and nervous system.

Scientists and researchers are way ahead of the game when it comes to creating smart applications and systems utilizing AI and it's beyond our imagination. I will discuss few advancements and after reading through, you can easily come to a conclusion as to what future AI holds and how it can have far fetched effects on society.

How Neural Network Works?

Neural networks concept is not new and is dated back to 1980s. It has recently become a reality due to advancement in graphics processing units. Due to hardware enhancements and availability of open source tools, neural networks is gaining parabolic fame and it's easier to create intelligent applications at rapid pace. Some of the few examples of these kinds of applications include Google AlphaGo and WaveNet.
Today, through AI, an application is capable of describing images in text form. Another interesting example is raw sounds and music can be generated using twisted wavelength. Recently few computer scientists from University of Washington demonstrated the use if AI using neural networks to fake a video. For more details please check this post.

The amazing thing about using neural network in AI is to minimize the human intervention and let the machine learn by itself and hence improves the outcome. Things can be taken further when two neural networks are combined together and made them compete against each other so that they can train and improve themselves. that's what Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks or simply StackGan is doing.

It uses one neural network to generate images and another neural network within the same system to decide if the generated image is real or fake. What ends up happening is that the generative neural network improves itself at generating images based on the feedback given by the deciding network and hence the network gets better at distinguishing what's real and fake without human intervention.

Img source

The results are just amazing, stunning and unbelievable, below are some of the images which are created just by a written text description. This type of dual network AI is called a generative adversarial network. This type of AI is brand new and is only invented in year 2014.

Img source

Are Machines becoming Smarter than Humans?

Recently, a company called 'Gamalon' based in Boston, created an AI engine that can rewrite its own code based on experience and probabilities. It's creators say that it could make the tedious part of coding artificial intelligence system completely automatic.
One of the Google researchers, Jeff Dean, giving a presentation at TED talk, this is what he said,

Take an example in the field of computer vision, every year there's a contest where teams compete to see who can give the right categories, out of a thousand different categories when given an image, and in 2011 before people were using neural networks, the winning team got an error rate of twenty six percent which doesn't sound too good, when you think that humans are at five percent on this task but fast forward in just five years and we're now at three percent error using deep learning and much more computational power, we're actually better than humans on this task - Link

As you can notice, computers can now see and recognize objects better than us for the first time ever, this has never happened before. From this you can get an idea as how fast AI is progressing and this has taken me by surprise and may be some of you too. President of company 'Alphabet', Sergey Brin said in one of his interview that

....It's an incredible time and and it's very hard to forecast you know what can these things do we don't really know the limits. Everything we can imagine and more it's a hard thing to think through and has really incredible possibilities

Human ophthalmologist are proved to be unreliable when diagnosing certain eye diseases in few experiments. Human ophthalmologists will only agree with each other's diagnosis 60% of the time but today artificial intelligence image recognition has been proven to perform better than professional humans in this field.

Conclusion

Artificial Intelligence techniques like deep learning and neural networks have made it possible to create machines which can learn by itself without human intervention and improve through mistakes just like we human do. There's definitely both positives and negatives. In general sense AI can be seen as a consistent means of growth in industrial revolution happening over the past several years. AI is helping in the medical field and making driving and other risky tasks safer.
This technology should be used with care and I personally think that it would depend on who controls and regulates AI, in case of open source tools available to everyone, this can be used in a good way so as people can use it in businesses to increase productivity, help in medical, health and other fields but conversely if AI is held in few hands at the top then the probability of getting good out of this amazing technology would drop and in this case this group will make it's own rules and some of you going to be thinking of a Skynet but right now it's still far too early to predict.

| Images taken from Pixabay

What do you think of the progress being made by Artificial Intelligence, leave your thoughts in the comment section :)