What is Intelligence?
It may be someone’s capability to solve mathematics problems faster, or, someone who completes the exam on time describes his/her intelligence. But what is it actually?
Intelligence has been defined in many ways:
- The capacity for logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving.
- More generally, it can be described as the ability to perceive or infer information and to retain it as knowledge to be applied towards adaptive behaviors within an environment or context.
How it All Started?
AI or Computers is not a desire for understanding the universe. It is not from wanting to further the frontiers of science and it’s not even because we wanted to organize the world’s information.
Computers exist because, some guy, let’s call him John, decided did he wanted to spend more time chilling at home rather than working hard.
The fundamental urge that rises any person is laziness.
We invented various forms of computing so that we can work less and spend more time relaxing.
The first thing that could be considered remotely close to a computer was the abacus, it is useful because it helped us calculate and keep track of the steps in our calculations.
But this still required us to know the time’s tables and we were too lazy for that. So we built a calculator.
Well there are quite a few steps in between some indentation and creation, lots of things but now we are here We figured out transistors and we could use them to perform logical tasks. So we now had something that could have somewhat made our life easy.
Look around, you can you live without laptops, smartphones, tabs, etc…?
But there is a problem, to make the machine do all that tasks, we have to program it, which is not easy. So we obviously wanted to be even lazier and that required our computers to do more. So we invented Artificial Intelligence.
Have you ever thought what if computers could do more than that if they could think like us? What if we could get the computer to do even more of the work that we previously thought could only be done by humans, like buying gifts, driving cars, flying planes, and even completing your assignment!! Okay just kidding :)!
We’re not quite there yet, but what about things like identifying the unripe fruit from our farm.
What would you tell the computer? What would your program look like? If an object’s color is red then keep it. What if next week it’s Chili harvesting time, and you only want to keep the green ones.
Well, I guess you’d have to rewrite your code. Wouldn’t it be great if we could actually teach the computer, What a tomato is?
Maybe we could refine our program if something is round red and around 100 grams. It’s probably a tomato problem, but it is more subtle than that.
Read more about Human and Artificial Intelligence.