Artificial Intelligence: a good assistant in daily life

Artificial Intelligence is a fascinating term in computer science. I believe that to let computer have the intelligence as a human being is the dreams to many CS people from day one they involve in this science field. With many years’ research and practices in this field, computers are becoming much smarter than before. Here, I would like to discuss some good applications of AI in today’s real life and my opinions for AI’s tomorrow.

It might not be known by many people that AI technology has already been used widely and people can find the track of it everywhere. One famous example is Siri (as with several latest versions of iPhone by Apple), which will turn your mobile phone to be a magic box that is able to talk to you and answer any of your questions. Although Siri is not perfect to deal with many hard questions and some strange replies are appearing now and then, it does bring better user experience with your phone in a more “human” way. Beside the necessary support from infrastructure improvement such as cloud computing, AI is the critical technology to enable this. AI will not only do help during human voice analysis and understanding, but also help search the correct answer from the internet and compose voice to express the answer back to users. 

reference: Where Is Technology Going To Take Us Next? 

If you are amazed about the intelligence of Siri, then you might not notice that there might be an even smarter AI that most people are using every day. Yes, it is Google. Behind many Google’s products, such as Google search engine, Google AD, Google map, there is a powerful “brain” behind to let Google’s service meet your requirement in the right way. By learning the huge amount of data from customers and on the internet, Google’s AI brain is accumulating knowledge in a fast way and has already be the most knowledgeable guy in the world and serve different kinds of requests around the world in a fast way. The brain is built up by “deep learning” technology, which is one of the fast developing technology in AI fields. Deep learning means that the more inputs to the brain, the smarter that the brain will be since it keeps learning from input data.

With the help of AI, computers are more like human beings and can take charge of many affairs that are done before by people. However, I believe that the final target of AI is not to totally replace or fully simulate people’s brain, but will be a strong enhancement to part of the brain’s functions that will do benefit to us. For example, a computer with human like mood will not be useful and might even be dangerous since it is hard to control.  We need AI to help understand the nature, such as to identify the valuable knowledge from big data and assist people to make critical decisions based on data analysis, while we don’t want AI to peep at everybody’s privacy and release to others. We want AI to be a smart guy while more important is to be a nice guy first.