Why is artificial intelligence so popular?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been around since the birth of computers in the 1950s. The original pioneers dreamed of making ‘computer brains’ that could perform the same kinds of tasks as our own brains, such as playing chess or translating languages. But hopes that AI would quickly reach human-level intelligence didn’t come to fruition, and AI soon fell out of favour.

Over the following decades, technology improved at an exponential rate. Computers got faster, the internet was invented, and researchers made new advances in AI algorithms.

In the last decade, AI has started solving many of the problems that we always dreamed it could. This has prompted billions of dollars of investment from companies, governments and financiers, and many major organisations now embrace AI as a core element of their business. Mention AI, and most people think of ‘deep learning’. This kind of AI is loosely inspired by the way our brains work. It uses lots of computers to simulate large networks of artificial ‘neurons’, which are then trained, typically using humongous amounts of data, until they’ve learned to do what we want them to – for example, understanding speech.

This training is the slow and resource-heavy part. Once trained, even a phone can then run the AI and instantly perform the right function, such as obeying your voice command. Deep learning is just one kind of AI, among thousands of others

Some AIs use advanced statistics to help computers make predictions, such as the likely side effects of a new drug; others use logic to make deductions about their environment, such as a robot mapping out a route; while others simulate evolution or even swarms of bees in order to find solutions to difficult problems such as scheduling activities in a factory or optimising the shape of an aircraft wing. The more advanced AIs can recognise features in images (that’s a half-hidden cat; that’s a corner of a bus) better than us, provide expert opinions more reliably than us (your test results mean you have an 85 per cent chance of condition X), and play many games better than us – most recently Go and classic arcade games like Asteroids.

But no AI can drive a car as well as an experienced driver, despite billions of dollars of research and data equivalent to more than 10 billion miles of driving. No artificial intelligence can control a robot to wash the dishes. No AI has an IQ more than that of an average six-year-old child.

We have very powerful computers, lots of training data, and some clever algorithms, but we still don’t know how to make an AI with the flexibility and learning capacity of the human brain – and we also don’t know how to make AIs that become cleverer without human input.

Science Focus