28 GLOSSARY Artificial Intelligence
YOUR AI CHEAT SHEET Words By Neal Romanek AI vehicle, deploy propaganda bots over social networks – strong AI tries to deliver the total package, a fully sentient being. Were Dr Frankenstein alive today, he would be
Artificial intelligence is going to affect our lives in unpredictable ways. So that you’re not caught completely of guard when the robots arrive, here are a few of the most important buzzwords in AI
Algorithms are not mysterious. They are human-designed sequences of instructions. If software behaves in a certain way, it’s because carefully constructed algorithms are instructing it to act in exactly that way. BLACK BOX A black box refers to a system where the input and output are known but the actual processes that produce the output are obscured, not examined, or not available. The black box is exemplified by machine learning, where the specific ways a system is improving or learning may not be entirely clear to the user, or to the developers. BOT A bot is a simple AI. It’s software, created to independently perform tasks that would be too time-consuming or impractical for a human to perform. We encounter and use bots everyday. Right now, spam bots are launching endless streams of emails at your inbox, and if you go to your ISP’s website to complain, you may be put on hold by a chatbot (or a single human overseeing multiple chatbots), and that infuriating post on your social media feed may actually just be the work of a propaganda bot, not a human. In popular culture, we think of bots as being kind of dumb. That’s due in part to their diminutive name and humble beginnings. But the term bot is becoming synonymous with any kind of compact artificial intelligence. Even if a bot is just a hammer in your digital toolkit, it can still be a very, very powerful hammer.
Short for artificial intelligence – as well you know – AI is a broad topic, and what might have been called artificial intelligence a generation ago is now just a regular part of day-to-day life. The most basic definition of artificial intelligence is the ability of machines to imitate intelligent, human-like behaviour. But there are some artificial intelligences that can solve remarkably complex problems but aren’t necessarily copying how the human brain works. In the case of some types of machine learning, we don’t know exactly how an AI works, only that it is producing a seemingly intelligent result. Artificial intelligence is therefore sometimes divided into two types: weak AI (aka narrow AI) and strong AI. Weak AI is a synthetic intelligence applied to a specific, narrow task. This is the type of AI we deal with on a daily basis. Object recognition AIs might surpass human minds for accuracy, but then they might be utterly useless for weather modeling. Strong AI (aka artificial general intelligence/AGI) is the type of artificial intelligence we see in movies. While weak AI uses computational power to perform specific tasks – build solar panels, drive a
researching strong AI. ALGORITHM The word ‘algorithm’ comes from the
Latinised name of the 9th century Persian scholar and mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. Al-Khwarizmi’s book The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing introduced the medieval world to algebra and to its application in solving a host of practical problems. For most of us, ‘algorithm’ means “a magical secret sauce that makes computers work”. But there’s nothing magical about an algorthim. An algorithm is a set of unambiguous calculations designed to solve a specific problem. Given that an algorithm is a logical series of mathematical steps, it will always produce a predictable outcome. Computer coding is the language we use to explain to computer hardware the algorithms we would like it to enact. Complex software uses whole constellations of algorithms co-operating to produce predictable outcomes.
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