During the late 18th century, the discovery of crude oil, lead to rapid industrialization. Industry veterans and economists termed the crude oil as Black gold. Ever wondered why the crude oil referred to as Black gold? Since oil is one of the valuable assets and due to its limited availability.
Recent news in the Indian Stock Market, telecom service-related company stock price is skyrocketing. What was the reason behind the bulls run? It was all about selling stakes in these firms to internet giants. Reliance alone has raised 10 billion USD by selling a 16% stake in Jio to Facebook and KKR. Google in talks with Vodafone-Idea to pick 5% stake and Amazon in talks with Bharti Airtel to acquire a stake worth 2 billion USD.
Why do these internet giants are looking forward to invest in telecom service-based companies?
To understand this, let us look into the number of subscribers in the above three telecom firms.
Importance of Big data
| Company | Number of Subscribers |
| Reliance Jio | 36.90 Crore |
| Vodafone-Idea | 33.62 Crore |
| Bharti Airtel | 32.73 Crore |
According to the Telephone Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), the total number of subscribers reached around 1.2 billion as per the recent report. The Common connection to all the above investments is Data. Data will be the most valuable asset for the upcoming years, and Data will be the new oil. Data Science combined with Artificial Intelligence will lead to unprecedented, change of course, of human history. The computer revolution took place around 1950, and our present-day machines, already perform low-level cognitive functions, humans need not perform such low-level tasks and take on challenging problems.
Artificial intelligence matching the human cognitive functionality engulf with two key questions.
1) When would this happen?
2) Will this turn into a good thing or bad thing to humanity?
You might think why we need to address this question?
Do you remember the famous animated series, Batman aired in 1992? In one of the episodes, Batman had to combat with Super Computer HARDAC. HARDAC’s mission was to replace Gotham citizens with robotic duplicates. Such kind of situation does trigger the aspect of AI safety, and many experts feel that this is the crucial aspect.
Image Credit: DC Comics
What is Artificial Intelligence ?
A simple definition of this will be Non-biological intelligence or the ability to accomplish any cognitive task at least as well as humans.
We may have misconceptions, that machines cannot have goals, that’s a myth.
A machine does have a goal, for example, a missile hitting its target. The objective of the missile to hit the target, the goals are aligned. When the goals are misaligned, AI can control the humans since superior intelligence enables the control.
When we compare human beings with artificial intelligence, it would be comparing humans learning skillset to the algorithms of artificial neural networks. Humans can think, concerning machines and systems, it’s about data stored in the database and segregated based on the features.
Different ways to define artificial intelligence
Image Credit: NPTEL
1) Systems which think like humans
2) Systems that think rational
3) Systems that act like humans
4) Systems that act rationally
Systems that think like humans based on Alan Turing test, where an interrogator asks questions to the object inside the room. The object inside the room process the questions and returns the solution based on the answer the interrogator needs to distinguish whether the answer is from a human or a computer. If the interrogator cannot distinguish whether the answer is from a human or a computer, then the system possesses artificial intelligence.
When we think of the rational agent system, it is a system that does the right thing, which perceives its environment through sensors thinks intelligently and perform the task around its surrounding. Rational agents in a system perform the following function, which helps them to perform the right task, this includes.
1) Sense
2) Think
3) Act
For instance, a camera and distance sensors in a self-driving car fall under the Sense task. The algorithms present in the self-driving car act as a rational agent that perceives the environment through camera and distance sensors.
A Cognitive AI system performs specific tasks to facilitate human intelligence, supports the system that use better data and algorithms. The cognitive system performs data mining, pattern recognition through structured and unstructured data. These systems capable of refining data and provide desirable solutions.
Applications of AI
In our day to day life, we come across many AI applications. Netflix has pioneered in using big data and artificial intelligence to drive their business. Currently, Netflix has around 182.8 million paying subscribers across the world. To understand their consumer behavior, Netflix uses AI algorithms, and big data, to figure out what we are watching and what we search on their platform. My recent experience with Netflix, after watching Inside the Mossad, a documentary series about former Mossad agents, to my surprise Netflix suggested a few more documentary similar to Inside the Mossad.
Image Credit: Netflix
All these data give them granular insights about customer behavior and use this data to come up with new content. Netflix can produce content, which would address their niche audience segment. It worked on its algorithm that understands consumer’s likes and dislikes and recommend the content accordingly. It uses AI, and big data in their streaming optimization technology, based on the consumer broadband speed variation. These algorithms help in predicting the speed at different time intervals and provide data to their machine-learning algorithm to decide whether they want to cache them on the local server for faster download option.
How does Google Duplex work?
One of our favorite search engine Google does collect, data through its product based on your search engine history, what music we play on YouTube, or where we travel using the Google map. Google is collecting gigabytes of data about their user behavior, which forms the basic building block for Big data analytics. One of the key breakthroughs by Google in the field of artificial intelligence is Google duplex, which is the extension of Google Assistant that can make phone calls to real humans with help of deep neural networks known as Wavenet technology. Wavenet is a speech synthesis program developed by combining short units of sound to create speech.
Duplex uses a recurrent neural network, which is a matrix multiplication function built up of artificial neurons known as nodes. The goal of the matrix is to reduce the amount of error. Recurrent neural network has a small internal memory that allows to remember to remember specific inputs to help and understand the context. This neural network forms the heart of most speech recognition algorithms.
Conclusion
With a lot of ongoing research and development, the goal of the AI researchers must be to create a beneficial artificial intelligence, which would align with our goals.
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