What is Artificial Intelligence?

What is Artificial Intelligence? Is it a series of electrical pulses in a circuit, or is it a synthetic consciousness on your computer? The answer to that is a little bit of both. But to fully understand how artificial intelligence contains aspects of both consciousness and numerical computations we must first understand how the brain works and the computational equivalence of this.

The brain works similarly to a computer that it sends electrical pulses throughout the entire brain to perform certain tasks. This can be to move particular muscles, release hormones that regulate emotion, or even create consciousness for ourselves. It is for that reason that many individuals believe that we are similar to computers in that manner as computers use electrical pulses to send messages across circuits. This thinking leads to the eventual conclusion that the way we perceive the world is accurately mimicked by electronics. But a major difference between the neural pathways of the human brain and the electrical pathways of a computer is that the human brain responds to stimuli differently depending on the situations that they have been through and the experiences that they will have. The human brain is not fixed at birth and continues to adapt deep into adulthood.

To mimic this response better computer scientists have created a sort of pseudo-neural pathway using deep learning, a hyperspecialized section of machine learning that acts sort of like an equation. Different nodes are all connected and given different weights. The weights are randomized to see how important a parameter is to the outcome of the neural network. A test set with inputs and outputs is used to test if the inputs of the neural network accurately give an output similar to the test output. An algorithm known as gradient descent is used to make the algorithm increasingly more accurate.

From this method, neural networks can perform superhuman feats such as creating completely original art with Dali or completely original responses to humans and even having a conversation with a human as if it were a real person.

Artificial intelligence is still in its cradle and there is vast room for improvement but from what it seems it appears as if we have a lot to look forward to in regard to the development of artificial intelligence.