If you read the news or are interested in science-fiction, you have probably heard of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is often referred to by its acronym, 'AI.' Artificial intelligence refers to having computers solve complex problems, or in other words find answers to tough questions. The tougher the question that an AI can answer, the 'stronger' the AI is.

 

We are yet to create an artificial intelligence that has what scientists call 'general intelligence' - which means having the ability to choose how one will approach solving a problem instead of being given a set of instructions. Instead, we have what are called 'soft AI.' Artificial intelligences today can be very good at solving single types of problems, but none can be used to solve a wide range of problems. AI is utilized today in science, government, healthcare, and pretty much any industry you can think of because of how much quicker it can be at solving problems than we are.

 

One misconception about artificial intelligence is that all the work is done by machines. In fact, when a problem gets solved using AI, a lot of the time humans did a lot of the work. Data has to be formatted correctly in order for it to be run through an algorithm, and it is hard to tell software how to format data correctly because there are usually countless ways in which it can be formatted wrong, so that is one area where people have to be involved. Another area where AI tends to need help is in identifying its own glitches - an artificial intelligence that recognizes faces, for example, may start to flag pictures of faces. Basically, someone has to be there to check its results.

 

A major component that makes artificial intelligences useful is Natural Language Processing (NLP). This is the part of a software that determines what question you are asking and translates it into instructions that a machine could follow. Often, the NLP segment of an AI is comprised of an AI itself, as human languages (and the ways in which humans use them) are complicated.

 

Theoretically, there aren't any problems that an artificial intelligence can solve and a human cannot. But for the most part AI's are faster. When you look at what an AI is in fact doing, it isn't too complicated. Take a sales enablement solution, for example. A sales manager might ask it: 'who are the customers we should most target in this geographical region?' In which case, the AI would look at all of the known customers in that region and factcheck whether (based on past sales performance) it would make sense to target them over others. On a granular level, that means it would be taking each customers age, income, etc. and comparing those to a profile describing an ideal customer. Humans can do that. But, to reiterate, an AI would be faster.