It's an AI World

by Daniel Perkins

Artificial Intelligence is in your life everyday, most of the time you don’t even realize. We are living in a world where if you have a smartphone, you are connected to a piece of technology that works by itself. I believe that soon you won’t need to carry a phone around with you to be connected in a building. Some people are already living this lifestyle, whilst others are becoming more accustomed to it.

AI is already in your home, office and almost every room you will walk into. Its purpose is to make your life easier by helping and informing you. Smart speakers are constantly listening for a set command phrase that it uses to realise you are talking to it. They have voice recognition to check that the person who is allowed to access it is who they are supposed to be; AI helps it to understand the different tones in your voice that might not sound exactly the same as when you first set the device up. AI is also used to convert the sound waves that come out of your mouth into words using ASR*. ASR has the same purpose as before but is not used for security, it is used because it learns from different voices and accents, compiling differently pronounced words into sentences which it can respond to. Aside from voice recognition, AI is used in many smart home products to learn how you go about your day. For example, the Google Nest Learning Thermostat records data constantly: time, temperature and user location are used so that the thermostat can change automatically based on how you like the temperature for when you wake up, go to sleep and come home from a day's work. Although some people find it intrusive, others find that the convenience of the automated lifestyle outways the problems of companies having access to your data. This is why AI and technology is constantly being able to develop and will carry on developing because people want a better way of living.

AI is becoming more independent and is gaining more capabilities every day. Soon someone will be able to create an AI bot that can code programs by itself. Of course it won’t be able to completely remove programmers, but it will be able to retrieve valuable hours of a coder’s life back so they can focus on more important things that the bot is incapable of doing. MIT students have been working towards this goal and are now able to create a bot that is capable of programming some basic code. They are teaching it to program itself because, according to Kim Martineau, ‘A computer that can program itself is more likely to learn a language faster and even model the way that humans write code.’ This is why creating an AI bot is extremely difficult, but not impossible, we want to go beyond a few lines of code, we aspire to be able to task the bot with a challenge and come back in an hour’s time to a working, debugged program. All of the pieces to get AI to work by itself are there, it’s putting them together which is the hard part. It is also difficult to get the amount of code correct, so that it doesn’t contain all of the programmers attributes but just enough to make the bot work similarly to a human. To a certain extent AI is only what people believe it should be based off what they have seen and heard, for some people if you have a bot that works by itself that is AI but for others they want something that mirrors the way humans work. This is why AI is already here and is becoming nearer to being as close to a human as possible, the AI that has already been made is merely a test subject to help develop what can be made in the future.

In conclusion, we are living in a world of AI without even realising it, although we are nowhere near the possible capabilities of it since it has only been around since 1955 and we have only just started to touch the surface of a new technological generation. AI is going to be in our lives whether you like it or not, and it is going to make our lives so much easier than before.

*Automatic Speech Recognition