Image Credits: Public Domain

Any technological advancement in the world changes people’s lives but how often do they totally revolutionise it in such a way that the old life is nothing but a memory. There have been several examples of this like the internet, smartphone, computers and many more.

In recent times however, all eyes have been on the advancements made in AI (Artificial Intelligence). You might have heard a lot about the many wonderful feats achieved in this field and if you read the news, the latest one is a total shocker!

What Is AI?

In lay man’s terms, it is the ability of computers to think and learn. Traditionally and even today, most computers work as they are programmed to. They do not have intelligence in that they cannot make sense of the data and can only do with it what it has been instructed to do.

A computer (or any machine) equipped with AI, will be able to not only gather data according to its wish, it will also be able to ‘understand’ the data and use the said data in any way it chooses. Basically, its giving the computers our way of thinking.

There will still be some kind of programming but at one point, it is suggested that AI could surpass our own intelligence and may even become self-aware.

How Does AI Get Smarter?

The most common technique used by researchers right now is to feed the program lots and lots of data. The AI can later make use of this data to perform future tasks on its own like how we humans learn from our experiences.

This can be seen in Tesla’s self driving cars. The more the cars drive and accumulate those miles, the smarter the system as a whole becomes. This leads to more intelligent cars who ‘know’ when to stop or avoid obstacles on the road and do hundreds of other things.

The bottom line is, more data equals smarter AI.

AI Making Itself Smarter

Researchers at Gamalon are employing a new technique to make AI smarter. Basically, they are applying something called ‘Bayesian program synthesis’ that allows the AI to become smarter with a lot less data needed to be fed to it.

In this scenario, the AI uses probabilistic programming to not only make predictions or determinations without prior experience or very less experience, but it can also rewrite its own code to tweak the probabilities that it uses to ‘understand’ things.

In essence, the AI is taking care of making itself smarter, automatically.

There is no need to be alarmed however, as the era of human like intelligent AI capable of thinking for themselves are quite in the future. The research that is going on in this field is being conducted very cautiously so that we do not share the same fate as the unfortunate people in so many sci-fi movies.