It’s no secret that artificial intelligence is all the rage these days. AI has been a hot topic for centuries, but it gained even more momentum with the introduction of self-driving cars and Siri on people’s smartphones. But there’s a lot of misinformation and confusion about what AI is.
AI, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning Are All the Same Thing
The first myth about AI is that AI, machine learning, and deep learning are all the same. They’re not! Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning are all related in that they’re different parts of what we call ‘AI,’ but they’re very distinct concepts. Artificial intelligence is the broadest concept of modern-day AI. It refers to any time a machine does anything considered intelligent, including solving problems or learning from data.
AI Systems Are Inherently Unfair
Regarding racism, AI systems are inherently unfair because they learn from existing data sets that humans fed into them. Algorithms can encode human bias, which is one of the primary reasons people think machine learning and deep learning are meaningless or harmful. People get an algorithm to make decisions by feeding it data; the more information they provide it, the better it gets at making those decisions.
AI Will Make Human Labor Obsolete
AI is a tool, and it’s not going to make humans obsolete. While artificial intelligence (plus deep learning and machine learning) have a significant impact on our world that will be felt in the coming decades, there’s no reason we can’t work alongside these systems. The most basic example of this is their smartphone: How many things do they do with it that the phone never tells them to do?
AI is Approaching Human Intelligence
The fourth common myth about AI is that it’s approaching human intelligence. This idea is based on early research into AI, which proposed that if they could build a machine with the intellectual capability of a person, they would essentially have created an artificial brain. This concept was called “strong AI.” So we know that we’re not quite there yet on strong AI, but what about “weak AI?” Weak AI is a computer system that performs a narrow range of human cognitive tasks.
AI Systems Are Only as Good as the Data They Train On
The final myth about AI is that it’s only as good as the data it trains on. This is true to some extent, but there are several mitigating factors. First, today’s machine learning systems are not 100 percent reliant on training data; they can also learn through observation. Second, even if their ML system depends on training data, it can still produce decent results if they give it high-quality data.
Despite the prevalence of these myths about AI, we’re making significant progress towards a more machine-enabled future, and we expect to see even greater advances in the coming years.