The application of artificial intelligence is ever-expanding in our continually expanding digital world. For movie fans, the first thing that might come to your mind when artificial intelligence flashes across your mind are either Jarvis or Ultron. Well, we do hope it is not Ultron in most cases. As an incredible piece of technology solution that is touching several aspects of daily life, it is becoming hard not to mention artificial intelligence whenever a technology discussion comes up.
It then begs the question – why is artificial intelligence everywhere and what is it used for exactly? In the lines that follow, we try to give a sensible breakdown into why AI is a necessary technology in our everyday life going forward.
So, What Is Artificial Intelligence?
The artificial intelligence of a machine is the capability of the said machine to imitate human-like capabilities. These capabilities may include reasoning, learning, creativity, planning, among others. Machine’s ability to learn and solve a problem is increasingly becoming useful for daily human activities and their application in making businesses run efficiently.
An AI system is capable of following some set rules to respond in a specific way to the input from their environment to achieve a specific goal. Just like the way humans feeds computer the data, process it and get the results, the AI system manages to do these tasks all on its own. The different AI systems are capable of achieving and adapting to some certain degree to mirror human-like activities autonomously.
Why is AI Becoming Important?
The advancement of computational power and quality data are making AI models more useful and applicable for human use. The breakthrough with digital transformation centers the use of AI for effective application for the future of several applications. Notably, this move to center AI also comes with the expectation to bring about enormous changes in the way we do things.
Businesses are beginning to depend on the capabilities of AI for their operations. Several businesses use AI to improve customer satisfaction, prediction of possible outcomes, address I.T problems, optimal operation of internal business, among several other benefits. Depending on the type of problem that the person or business is facing, different AI types will provide the appropriate solution.
How AI is Influencing Everyday Life
Everybody that uses a smartphone and the internet already has something to do with AI in one way or another. AI comes as software in form of virtual assistants like Siri in iPhones and Ok Google in android devices. Software AI also comes in image analysis, search engines, face recognition, among several others.
Interestingly, there is also the embodied AI system type that packs several bits of AI models to solve problems. Typically, this AI type is what you will see in robots, self-driving cars, the internet of things, high-flying drones, among other autonomous devices. Depending on the problem, different individuals and companies deploy these AI types to provide the results they wish to get from them.
Below are some of some AI solutions that you interact with daily that you may not be aware of:
- Google Navigation
The impact of Google’s navigation system and how it influences day-to-day commute is broad, to say the least. Somehow, this fusion of Google’s map system and the artificial intelligence model makes commuting relatively easier. The complicated yet simple way with which these systems work together to take data from different traffic and navigation systems to spot holdups and re-plan your route makes commuting easier.
The infusion of machine learning to Google maps makes everyday commute and alert to traffic downs more efficient for its users. This system can also predict and identify delays to flight, trains, and road transport networks. It takes data from traffic systems, weather conditions, and several other data points to make these predictions. - Autonomous Driving Cars
Although this is more of a futuristic use, the actualization of self-driving cars is closer than ever. Tesla cars among other EV cars are making giant strides in this regard with the use of multiple sensors and AI models to better understand and make decisions based on their surroundings. These sensors can collect data that translate their environment into actionable data points. Different AI models work simultaneously to process the chunk of data to make decisions while self-driving.
The operation behind self-driving cars process complex data using machine learning, image recognition, and neural networks for its operation. Neural networks identify the patterns in data and input them into machine learning models. The machine learning models make a decision, in real-time, directing the car on what next to do based on the information of its current environment. - Advertisement
Personalization and recommendation of certain information to individuals based on their previous search and online behavior are widely dependent on AI. Several tech companies use the information about the information they have about an individual to recommend similar posts that they think the individual might find useful. AI model is highly useful for making all these happen. - Online Shopping
Asides from advertisement, AI is very important in the commerce space. Online shoppers get instant recommendations based on their buying history. AI is also useful in optimizing product search, planning inventory management, logistics and delivery, among several other uses. - Other uses
AI is widely useful for web searches, digital assistants, machine translation, smart city infrastructure, cyber security, health, and several other sectors. Its current impact and futuristic uses are becoming a reality day by day.