Artificial Intelligence: in everyday life
What is Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI)?
This is the most common form of AI that you’d find in the market now. These Artificial Intelligence systems are designed to solve one single problem and would be able to execute a single task really well. By definition, they have narrow capabilities, like recommending a product for an e-commerce user or predicting the weather.
What is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)?
AGI is still a theoretical concept. It’s defined as AI which has a human-level of cognitive function, across a wide variety of domains such as language processing, image processing, computational functioning and reasoning and so on.
What is Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI)?
We’re almost entering into science-fiction territory here, but ASI is seen as the logical progression from AGI. An Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) system would be able to surpass all human capabilities. This would include decision making, taking rational decisions, and even includes things like making better art and building emotional relationships.
AI is used in different domains to give insights into user behaviour and give recommendations based on the data. For example, Google’s predictive search algorithm used past user data to predict what a user would type next in the search bar. Netflix uses past user data to recommend what movie a user might want to see next, making the user hooked onto the platform and increasing watch time. Facebook uses past data of the users to automatically give suggestions to tag your friends, based on the facial features in their images. AI is used everywhere by large organisations to make an end user’s life simpler. The uses of Artificial Intelligence would broadly fall under the data processing category, which would include the following:
- Searching within data, and optimising the search to give the most relevant results
- Logic-chains for if-then reasoning, that can be applied to execute a string of commands based on parameters
- Pattern-detection to identify significant patterns in large data set for unique insights
- Applied probabilistic models for predicting future outcomes
AI in everyday life
Below are some AI applications that you may not realise are AI-powered:
Online shopping and advertising
Artificial intelligence is widely used to provide personalised recommendations to people, based for example on their previous searches and purchases or other online behaviour. AI is hugely important in commerce: optimising products, planning inventory, logistics etc.
Web search
Search engines learn from the vast input of data, provided by their users to provide relevant search results.
Digital personal assistants
Smartphones use AI to provide services that are as relevant and personalised as possible. Virtual assistants answering questions, providing recommendations and helping organise daily routines have become ubiquitous.
Machine translations
Language translation software, either based on written or spoken text, relies on artificial intelligence to provide and improve translations. This also applies to functions such as automated subtitling.
Smart homes, cities and infrastructure
Smart thermostats learn from our behaviour to save energy, while developers of smart cities hope to regulate traffic to improve connectivity and reduce traffic jams.
Cars
While self-driving vehicles are not yet standard, cars already use AI-powered safety functions. The EU has for example helped to fund VI-DAS, automated sensors that detect possible dangerous situations and accidents.
Navigation is largely AI-powered.
Cybersecurity
AI systems can help recognise and fight cyberattacks and other cyber threats based on the continuous input of data, recognising patterns and backtracking the attacks.
Artificial intelligence against Covid-19
In the case of Covid-19, AI has been used in thermal imaging in airports and elsewhere. In medicine it can help recognise infection from computerised tomography lung scans. It has also been used to provide data to track the spread of the disease.
Fighting disinformation
Certain AI applications can detect fake news and disinformation by mining social media information, looking for words that are sensational or alarming and identifying which online sources are deemed authoritative.
