What is artificial intelligence?
When we hear about artificial intelligence, it can still sound like the future, but nothing could be further from the truth, since we live with it in the most everyday activities. On any given day, when we wake up, we can ask Siri or Alexa what the weather will be like or whether there are traffic jams on the way to work; while we get ready to leave, we set the robot vacuum cleaner running; after reading a news item on any social network, we can ask Google to translate a phrase or article for us; in the car, we have lane-change control systems, emergency braking, or traffic sign recognition, and when we get to work we see robots on assembly lines or how email identifies spam…
In all these activities, and many more, we use a technology that is set to revolutionize the world across the most diverse sectors. But… what is artificial intelligence? Put simply, it refers to technological developments that endow machines with capabilities similar to those developed by human beings, such as learning, reasoning, vision… all with many nuances but, essentially, these are functionally comparable qualities for carrying out various tasks.
Looking a little more closely at the examples mentioned at the beginning, personal assistants, which are very popular right now, recognize our words to respond to our questions or conversations; autonomous vacuum cleaners detect obstacles and react to avoid them; and traffic sign recognition systems, for example, locate traffic signs, identify them, and alert us to the instructions they provide. All these actions are replicas, generated through algorithms, of the capabilities that people have to interact with our environment and solve problems.
Applications across all sectors
These examples are simple, but Artificial Intelligence has enormous potential across all sectors of activity: industry, healthcare, education, mobility, and much more. Autonomous vehicles already exist; machines identify pathologies in X-rays with extremely high levels of efficiency; they find alternatives to medicines against bacteria in just a few hours (a task that used to require months of development); and they drive industry to the highest levels of effectiveness through demand forecasting and predictive maintenance systems, for example.
The combination of big data and artificial intelligence is driving the rapid development of the latter. Today’s capacity for data collection, analysis, and management is immense, which makes it possible to bring artificial intelligence to the highest levels of operational capability in any sector. The more high-quality data that can be obtained and processed, the better the capabilities we can instill in machines. More and better data means more and better artificial intelligence systems.
Four types of artificial intelligence
In 2009, Peter Norvig and Stuart Russell distinguished four types of artificial intelligence based on their functionalities. In this way, they refer to systems that act like humans—in this case, the example is very clear: robots; systems that think like humans—this includes machine learning and its artificial neural networks; systems that think rationally, such as expert systems, which emulate the reasoning of a professional in specific fields; and systems that act rationally, such as intelligent agents, capable of assessing contexts in order to act accordingly.
From this classification it follows, as we have already noted, that artificial intelligence enables computers to perceive the environment for which they have been programmed and, based on its specific circumstances, solve the problems presented to them autonomously, through the processing of the data they capture and know. And here lies its great advantage: AI perceives a reality for which it has been programmed, analyzes it, explores the different options within its reach, provides a solution, and, in many cases, learns from this experience to improve the next ones. In other words, it is capable of modifying its behavior according to specific situations with learned responses.
As we can see, the applications are endless across all sectors. In the coming years, we will experience an explosion of artificial intelligence systems—already underway—that will help us increase efficiency in any type of activity. At the business level, those who do not get on board with the countless advances being made in this area will cease to be competitive. Technology evolves, and we must evolve with it.
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