Computer communication

Gain a better understanding of tech talk as artificial intelligence continues to develop

- Marais Neethling

The term ‘AI/ML’ has become exceptionally popular, but what exactly do the experts mean when they refer to AI/ML? AI/ML is a field in computer science that tries to use computers to solve problems that were previously only solvable by humans. For years, computers excelled at number crunching but certain tasks, such as voice recognition (hearing), object recognition in photos (vision) and predicting behaviour of agents in unconstrained or uncertain environments, remained a challenge for programmers to overcome.

Times have dramatically changed. These days, computer algorithms can perform as well or better than humans on a few narrow tasks that typically take a human between zero and three seconds (rule of thumb) to perform. These tasks are usually perception tasks that don’t require deep, abstract thought by the human brain. Of course, there are contradictions to this rule of thumb. Consider generative models that write semi-coherent paragraphs of English text or compose musical scores or even invent art. However, these models arguably don’t apply ‘creative thinking’ in the human-like way we are used to, it is merely an extension of the algorithms used in perception-based problem-solving.

Learn the lingo

So, what do the terms ‘artificial intelligence’, ‘machine learning’, ‘deep learning’ and ‘data science’ mean and what are their differences? To find the answers, we’ll delve into the history of artificial intelligence.