Debunking the fear of rise of AI

An attempt to explain the underlying workings of today's AI systems and thereby reduce the fear and apprehension among public about the rise of AI.

Deepak Karkala

June 2019

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Why this project ?

'Artificial Intelligence' - is the general term used to refer to a myriad of algorithms powering applications in widely different domains such as image recognition, language translation, voice recognition, game playing, preventive maintenance and so many more. While the term itself has become synonymous among public with some variant of super human intelligence of machines, the truth is quite far from it. In fact, most AI and machine learning practitioners would cringe at the use of the term 'Artificial Intelligence' for most of the above mentioned applications. Fueled by this gap of understanding and the depiction of doomsday scenarios in the pop culture over a number of decades, the vast population of general public view AI with fear and apprehension. This article is an attempt to address this gap by explaining the working of today's AI systems and how far we still are from building a truly general 'Artificial Intelligence' machine.

This project presents an intuitive explanation of how AI models work in various applications. The article also goes on to describe 'Artificial General Intelligence' (AGI) the type of which can attain human level intelligence in wide variety of tasks and explain what today's systems (often termed as 'narrow AI') lack in order to become 'General Intelligence'. Perhaps with the understanding of these concepts a lot more people would feel less startled about the rise of AI.

Storyboarding

Challenges faced and learnings from project

The project aimed at providing an intuitive explanation of how AI systems work. Typically in order to explain such algorithms, the underlying mathematical concepts need to be introduced to the reader. However the major challenge in this project was to make the readers aware of the working of AI algorithms without assuming any background in the subject. This is particularly hard since the concepts need to be introduced in a very engaging manner in order to retain the reader's interest. Tim Urban's articles on Wait But Why was especially inspiring in this regard. Through this project, I ended up getting a better understanding of the fine art of making the articles both informative and engaging at the same time.

Inspired from

Tim Urban's The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence

References

Credits