What is Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) ?

Digital Thinkers’ Club

A 5min introduction that highlights what it is, the challenges to scale, the impacts on society – both bad and good

The technical term for building input A→ output B software is supervised learning.

So what can A→B do? Andrew Ng: Here’s one rule of thumb that speaks to its disruptiveness:If a typical person can do a mental task with less than one second of thought, we can probably automate it using AI either now or in the near future.
Eg — is this image a cat? is this behavior suspicious?…

Challenge for scale:
1-It requires a huge amount of data.
In 2012, the New York Times reported that a cluster of 16,000 computers dedicated to trained itself to recognize a cat based on 10 million digital images.
2- computational power
3- Other issue: talent. there is currently a war for the scarce AI talent that can do the work.

According to a recent survey by the World Economic Forum, by the year 2020, automation, and AI will lead to a loss of 7 million jobs in 15 countries. The irony is that a majority of the jobs lost will be for people who can least afford it.

the same survey does highlight a creation of 2 million new, high-paying jobs in AI. That’s less than what it would destroy.

there are other societal benefits that go beyond the job market – for example in medicine.

Interesting reads:
https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-artificial-intelligence-can-and-cant-do-right-now
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/documents/Artificial-Intelligence-Automation-Economy.PDF
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/05/16/how-ai-and-deep-learning-is-now-used-to-diagnose-cancer/#5b15a96bc783
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/microsoft-solve-cancer-computer-science
https://www.wired.com/2017/05/using-ai-detect-cancer-not-just-cats/
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-38717928
http://news.stanford.edu/2017/01/25/artificial-intelligence-used-identify-skin-cancer/

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