I recently wrote about the “input data” humans use for learning as well as the data AI learns from. This takes the lessons from these two discussions and shows the implications this has on artificial intelligence—its capabilities, limitations, and how to think about the intelligence in artificial intelligence. We’ll see that generally human minds...
Category - Understanding AI
Making the principles of AI more accessible and understandable. This includes diving into deep learning, the latest advances in NLP, and how the mind and AI work, with a focus on making the core ideas relatable.
I recently wrote about the “input data” humans use for learning. This week I’m turning my attention to computers, showing what the input data to artificial intelligence systems looks like. We’ll see that for some simple but abstract tasks like spam filtering, computers have advanced input data painstakingly crafted by humans, while more modern...
People have a wide range of perspectives on artificial intelligence. Some people are concerned about errors in the decisions being made by algorithms. Others are worried it will take over the world. Some are pushing this field forward and improving all of our lives in the process. Many see the value in the products AI powers but don’t think much...
One of the questions I get most often is: how do we protect ourselves from advanced AI taking over the world? There are many variants, from less-concerned questions about what type of AI we should be investing in to even more paranoid versions of this question. The simple answer is: we don’t even need to think about it. At least not anytime soon...
Humans and computers can both use the rules of logic. For humans, it’s a small part of our thinking. For systems using AI, it’s pretty much all they do. Human thinking When we think, as humans, much of our thought is based on things we observed with our senses. This might be because we’re looking at a restaurant menu, watching a television, or...
Artificial Intelligence is playing a critical role in the fight against coronavirus, though it can be hard to understand how exactly it’s contributing in our world full of sensational headlines. I’ll help to cut through this noise. But first, what are others saying? Some stories claim AI is going to completely solve the problem, with headlines...
Classification is the problem in AI that computers are best at solving. It’s used by billions of people in everday life, including for: spam filtering, fraud detection, and even to unlock your iPhone with Face ID. When you hear the term “classification,” though, the first thing that may come to mind is some complex system for organizing...
I generally write about artificial intelligence: how machines learn. Many of the most interesting observations in this area come by comparing artificial intelligence to human intelligence. Here I’ll examine how humans learn, before providing some high-level analogies to how AI learns which I’ll explore more in future posts. Reality &...
Artificial intelligence algorithms, which are based on statistics, make mistakes. Since they accomplish things that wouldn’t otherwise be possible, we tolerate these errors. Most people wouldn’t want a human being reviewing every email sent to Gmail to determine whether or not it’s spam. That would be pretty creepy. But even if having a perfect...
Machine learning often uses lots of fancy math, but what it’s doing is very simple. Let’s focus on classification, a common type of machine learning where the system decides between two alternatives. This includes spam filtering, face recognition, fraud detection, and many others. Classification is a category of machine learning algorithms...