HOW AI WILL CHANGE YOUR FUTURE

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS NO LONGER THE STUFF OF SCIENCE FICTION. HERE ARE SOME OF THE MANY WAYS IT’S TRANSFORMING OUR WORLD

THE TERM 'ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE', OR AI, WAS COINED BY AMERICAN COMPUTER SCIENTIST JOHN MCCARTHY in 1995 and relates to the science of making machines 'intelligent'. But Al isn't a recent technology - the concept has been around since the early 1900s as basic programs to solve mathematical equations.

British logician Alan Turing famously cracked German military code during World War II, and he also devised one of the first 'intelligent' machines, now known as a Turing machine. The mathematical model was created to solve simple calculations such as the square root of large numbers, and can even solve a sudoku puzzle.

Since then, AI has turned into a multi-billion-dollar industry that has infiltrated every sector in some way. Today you would be hard pressed to look around a room and not find some form of Al-assisted technology. Smart assistants such as Alexa, smartphone facial recognition, spell checking and even your Netflix suggestions all use AI that learns your preferences, physical qualities and online behaviour.

AI learns all these things similar to the way the human brain learns. At the most basic level, information that's fed by your senses to your brain, such as sight, sound and taste, is translated and given meaning. When you hear a meow, your brain recognises the noise and correctly associates it with a cat. The aural information is detected by the ears, an electrical signal is generated and carried through cells called neurons, translated by the brain and attributed meaning.

The Thinking Machine