Everything you wanted to know about AI – but were afraid to ask

theguardian.com:

Barely a day goes by without some new story about AI – artificial intelligence. The excitement about it is palpable – the possibilities, some say, are endless. Fears about it are spreading fast, too.

Yet, increasingly, there is a lot of assumed knowledge and understanding about AI, which can be bewildering for people who have not followed every twist and turn of the debate.

So, the Guardian’s technology editors, Dan Milmo and Alex Hern, are going back to basics – answering the questions that millions of readers may have been too afraid to ask.

The term is almost as old as electronic computers themselves, coined back in 1955 by a team including legendary Harvard computer scientist Marvin Minsky.

In some respects, it is already in our lives in ways you may not realise. The special effects in some films and voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa all use simple forms of artificial intelligence.

But in the current debate, AI has come to mean something else.

It boils down to this: most old-school computers do what they are told. They follow instructions given to them in the form of code.

But if we want computers to solve more complex tasks, they need to do more than that. To be smarter, we are trying to train them how to learn in a way that imitates human behaviour.

Computers cannot be taught to think for themselves, but they can be taught how to analyse information and draw inferences from patterns within data sets.

And the more you give them – computer systems can now cope with truly vast amounts of information – the better they should get at it.

The most successful versions of machine learning in recent years have used a system known as a neural network, which is modelled at a very simple level on how we think a brain works.

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