Robots are replacing many jobs that were previously done by a human. Robots are even being deployed to some militaries. Microsoft uses AI as a customer support robot. When you mention artificial intelligence to anyone who doesn’t know a thing about it, they will either mention Siri on their phone or the “inevitable” uprising of artificial intelligence robots. The truth is that artificial intelligence is much more than that. AI can be used in cases from calculating equations more efficiently to discovering the cure to cancer.

I’ve always seen games with these dystopian and cyberpunk futures where robots and robotic human enhancements are everything, like Deus Ex, Ghostrunner, and Cyberpunk 2077. The reality of these robots seem like something you will only see in the movies, but they are closer to reality than you think. With what I’ve heard about Artificial Intelligence, I thought it would be a lot more involved. It turns out that AI does the work for you. What I failed to realize is that the point of AI is for you to do less. AI does a lot of the coding for you.

gan

Generative Adversial Networks

I find it interesting that I can give an initial image, and a computer program can generate another image from it. This is a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). It can generate realistic data (mostly used for images) from a set of data in a database. The generator will generate data from the input, and the discriminator will decide if what it is given is real or fake. This can be used in applications from adding a few numbers to a dataset to generating faces. All of this is done inside of a program that simulates a human brain. One of my favorite examples of this technology is https://thisxdoesnotexist.com/. This X Does Not Exist is a series of websites that use artificial intelligence and machine learning to generate something that does not exist.

The Use of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is thrown around everywhere from Microsoft using it to apply Windows updates to your email provider saying they use AI to “optimize” your inbox. The problem with these examples and everything in between is that they are slapped on for marketing when they are either not needed or used as technobabble. This is one of AI’s biggest problems. People don’t see AI for what it’s really for; rather, they see AI as what the big corporations say it is. AI is a utility that can simulate a human brain to preform human-like tasks like thinking, not some silly software that will optimize your smart toaster to toast your bread 5 seconds faster when a new update comes out every 5 months.

AI is something that we all should learn. It is one of those things that should be taught in schools all around the world, but it is not. AI is very useful in our daily lives from telling us the weather in the morning to solving the mystery of life. I feel that if we all learn AI, we can contribute to something that will change the world for the greater good… or cause the inevitable robot uprising.

See, robots, I don’t hate you. Please spare me!