1. What is Artificial Intelligence?
Hey there! I'm Iason, and I’m thrilled to guide you through this journey into Artificial Intelligence. This course was created in collaboration with Iván Palomares Carrascosa, so you’re in great hands. Let’s dive in!
AI might seem like a recent buzzword, but it’s actually been around for decades. Back in the 1950s, legendary mathematician Alan Turing posed a groundbreaking question: "Can machines think?"
This question sparked a revolution, and soon after, AI emerged as an exciting new scientific field. At the time, expectations were sky-high. Some even believed that computers would soon be indistinguishable from humans. Turing himself suggested that a machine could be considered intelligent if it could successfully trick a human into believing it was one.
But let’s take a step back—where exactly did AI come from? AI grew as a specialized field within computer science, the discipline that powers everything from hardware and programming languages to operating systems and algorithms. Computer science is a vast field with many interconnected areas, and AI became one of its most fascinating branches.
While all these areas of computer science influence each other, our focus now is on Artificial Intelligence and how it has evolved over time.
AI has been defined in many ways. In the 1950s, John McCarthy, another AI pioneer, described it as the science and engineering of making intelligent machines. Over time, this definition expanded to describe AI as the creation of machines that learn, reason, make decisions, and mimic human-like intelligence to solve problems.
In today’s data-driven world, the European Commission defines AI as systems that perceive their environment, collect and interpret data, reason over inferred knowledge, make decisions, and take actions to achieve a goal. AI has grown from a theoretical concept into a powerful force shaping industries and everyday life.
Even with all its advancements, AI has its limits. The concept of Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, represents a level of AI that could match or surpass human intelligence across a wide range of tasks. While today’s AI, often referred to as Artificial Narrow Intelligence, excels at solving specific problems, AGI would possess the ability to think, reason, and adapt like a human.
Despite major breakthroughs, true AGI doesn’t exist yet. Some AI systems can emulate human intelligence in certain tasks, but none have exceeded it. Voice assistants, face recognition, self-driving cars, and even generative AI models like GPT demonstrate remarkable capabilities, but they remain specialized rather than truly general intelligence.
AI is still in its early days, with incredible potential for the future. As we continue exploring this field, we’ll see how AI is shaping the world and what’s next on the horizon. Let’s get started!
2. Let's practice!