What is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is technology that facilitates computers and machines to replicate human intelligence and problem-solving capabilities. Digital assistants, GPS guidance, generative AI tools etc. are few AI technologies which we are using in our daily lives. A system that can emulate human thinking and seem to act like human can be considered as an AI tool.

Simply put, an AI application or engine has the ability, agility and computing power of a machine to execute functions such as sensing, reasoning and acting similar to that of human beings. This makes faster in ways than human beings.

There is popular apprehension that the AI technology will replace humans. However, this is not true. No AI application can ever replace human, rather it is meant to assist or serve human in a smarter way, achieve more work and better productivity. Artificial Intelligence covers a broad area of computer science and it consists of numerous intelligent and learning behaviour techniques. AI is closely related to 'computational intelligence' which includes the core techniques like evolutionary computation, quantum computing, machine learning, neural networks and DNA computing.

However it is sub-field of computer science and is aimed at developing a set of technologies that are capable of doing things that are traditionally done by human and requires more than just computing. AI is used predominantly in robotics and in mechanical setups. In language technology, AI is used in tasks that were usually done in Natural Language Processing following various methods. AI is used in machine translation, speech recognition, Text to speech Recognition and various other tasks. Large Language Models are trained on large sets of linguistic data to develop prediction algorithms that are used in forecasting and giving probabilistic results. AI-based tools can be deployed in diverse field such as education, national security, health care, finance, transportation, entertainment, media, law etc. and it can impact on our everyday life.