19/02/2023
Overview
Intelligence is the ability to take in information and store it as knowledge to construct adaptive behavior in an environment or context
This definition of intelligence from the (English-language) Wikipedia can be applied to both the organic brain and the machine. The presence of intelligence does not imply the presence of consciousness. This is a common misconception brought into the world by science fiction writers.
Try searching the internet for examples of AI and you will surely get at least one reference to IBM Watson, which uses a machine learning algorithm that became famous after winning a TV quiz called "Jeopardy" in 2011. Since then, the algorithm has undergone some changes and has been used as a template for many different commercial applications. Apple, Amazon, and Google are actively working on similar systems in our homes and pockets.
Natural language processing and speech recognition were the first examples of commercial use of machine learning. They were followed by other recognition automation tasks (text, audio, images, video, faces, etc.). Applications of these technologies are constantly growing and include unmanned vehicles, medical diagnostics, computer games, search engines, spam filters, anti-crime, marketing, robot control, computer vision, transportation, music recognition and more.
AI is so tightly embedded in the technology we use today that many people don't even think of it as "AI," that is, they don't separate it from conventional computer technology. Ask any passerby if there's artificial intelligence in his smartphone, and he'll probably answer, "No." But AI algorithms are everywhere, from predicting typed text to automatically focusing the camera. Many people think AI should come in the future. But it appeared some time ago and is already here.
The term "AI" is quite generalized. The focus of most research right now is the narrower field of neural networks and deep learning.
How our brains work
The human brain is a complex carbon-based computer, performing an estimated one billion billion operations per second (1,000 petaflops) while consuming 20 watts of energy. A Chinese supercomputer called "Tianhe-2" (the fastest in the world at the time of writing) performs 33860 trillion operations per second (33.86 petaflops) and consumes 17600000 watts (17.6 megawatts). We have a certain amount of work to do before our silicon computers can match the evolutionary carbon ones.
The exact description of the mechanism used by our brains to "think" is a subject for debate and further research (I personally like the theory that brain work is related to quantum effects, but that is a topic for a separate article). However, the mechanism of how parts of the brain work is usually modeled with