Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

While we go about our daily lives, Artificial Intelligence (AI), is developing at a rapid rate. Many businesses are using AI to increase production, sales, and analysis of the products in use by consumers. The Internet of Things, with RFID sensors placed into or on a wide variety of products in daily use, are sending information through the internet to the cloud for analysis and use by the companies who are designing and manufacturing products.

Amazon, which sells books and a wide spectrum of other products, uses algorithms to collect information from the cloud on individual consumers and then uses that information to recommend other products to each of them. Consumers may like or discard the recommendations, but they receive them on a regular basis through the internet directly to their computer. That process has advantages to the consumer in making a selection of what to purchase, or it may be felt to be a nuisance.

Not seen is what is going on behind the scenes, the fact that the algorithms and the computers that power them are doing something else. Working together, the computer/algorithm is doing something that humans do on a daily basis; it is learning, figuring things out, coming to conclusions based on the facts it works with. That may all seem normal.

However, the normality is different from what might be expected. The computer that uses an algorithm is inputting facts and coming to conclusions that sometimes computer scientists did not expect or did not understand how the computer came up with the conclusion. Scientists are explaining that process as machine learning, which often analyzes data in ways scientists do not. Sometimes the method used in machine learning is not clear or does not make sense in terms of normal scientific thinking.

Machine learning is fascinating in that it does not always determine the best answers in a way scientists normally would and it brings new perspectives or new ways of thinking that had not been understood or used by humanity at any time in its history. The question is, are the results of machine learning beneficial or dangerous to humans? If computers with algorithms are learning in ways not understood by scientists and in effect creating an entirely new way(s) of understanding the world we live in, can they be controlled for the benefit of mankind? Some scientists think it can be controlled; others are not so sure.

If you are interested in what is going on with machine learning, stay tuned.