Artificial Inteligent in Our Society (Essay Sample)

Artificial Intelligence in Society
Moses Njeru
Mount Kenya University
Abstract
This report deals with artificial intelligence in society (AI). My motivation for writing this report was to expand my reader and my own knowledge of artificial intelligence. I read news articles, journals, books, blogs, and watched online lectures to get this information. The topics i will talk about will mention anything related to AI in history, later when actual progress was made, the progress and stages involved.
Introduction
Unbeknownst to me at the time my first experience with artificial intelligence was playing video games. I must have been at the ripe age of 5 already feverishly enjoying my Super Nintendo and Mario games. It never occurred to me the coding, algorithms, and all the hard work that was required to have the computer, my "opponent," be challenging. My only assumption was it was always like that. It wasn’t until years later did I get the opportunity to see how artificial intelligence (AI) began. AI didn’t start so children could have fun; it started because some men had a dream, a dream to create artificial intelligent machine. Ancient History The first mention of anything remotely related to AI involved imagination. It was in an ancient Greek myth by Homer, Buchanan a poet.in the year (2005). This may not have any use to us now, but the fact we imagined what it would be like to have mechanical assistance 3000 years ago is fascinating. In the dawn on the 1940s and 50s scientists speculated forming an artificial brain. This included sciences from many fields: engineering, psychology, biology, mathematics, computer science, and economics. Then a new field of science was found, artificial intelligence. This new and exciting field is defined by McCarthy, John; Minsky, Marvin; Rochest; Nathan; Shannon, Claude (1955) as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines. Scientists met together at Dartmouth College, known as the Dartmouth Meeting, to discuss how computers given enough power could not only outperform humans, but solve many complex problems, explain Turban, Sharda, and Delen (2011). Although, McCarthy and his colleague’s confidence in AI is admirable they were far too optimistic. Human intelligence was far more difficult to emulate than originally perceived. The evolution of AI as characterized by Turban et al.’s (2011) is as follows: naive solutions, general methods, domain knowledge, hybrid solutions, and embedded applications, each more complex than the last (located in figure 1). Their original optimism was during the naive solutions era, the solutions at that time were primitive and "after a few years of trial and error, scientists started focusing on developing more effective problem-solving methods, such as knowledge representation schemes, reasoning strategies, and effective search heuristics." According to Turban et al.’s (2011). This was going on through the 60’s and 70’s and as we passed the general method era into the domain knowledge era A I was finally being applied to real-world uses. These applications were known as knowledge-based systems and expert systems. The following decade, 1990s, featured hybrid systems comprised of case-based and rule-based systems. In the last decade we encountered embedded an applications that are in business rules, video games, all the way into homeland security. (Turban et al.’s 2011).
The most popular moments in AI had resound effects on society motivating and inspiring people that it was becoming more advanced. One of these first popular systems was the IBM computer, Deep Blue. Deep Blue was a chess program developed by Dr. Feng Hsiung Hsu in 1985. It played against the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, for the first time in 1988 and was defeated. After years of refinement and fine-tuning Deep Blue was ready to play again in 1996. Although, Kasparov still won 4-2 in the six games battle it still was a milestone in AI. ("Deep Blue beats Kasparov at chess," 1996).The next big moment in popular AI was another IBM super computer, Watson. Two of Jeopardies biggest winners, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, attempted to defeat this super computer in an all-out battle of puns, play on words, metaphors, similes etc. Watson managed to defeat both of them, but did stumble on a couple subject such as: politics, and historical geography. Why this is so significant is because of the "machine’s ability to understand context in human language." After personally watching the match it became apparent that Watson’s true advantage was not only that it could read 200 million pages of information stored in its memory in 3 seconds, but that it could also activate the buzzer faster than a human can. ("IBM Watson Wins Jeopardy, Humans Rally Back," 2011)
The last popular AI example is my personal favorite, its Google’s self-driving car. The fact that we even have self-driving cars already is astounding. Currently only three states allow citizens to operate driverless cars: California, Florida and Nevada. "The automated cars use video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to "see" other traffic, as well as detailed maps (which Google collect using manually driven vehicles) to navigate the road ahead. This is all made possible by Google’s data centers, which can process the enormous amounts of information gathered by their cars when mapping their terrain. ("What we’re driving at," 2010).
A very controversial topic is of the singular...