Everyone is now talking about the dawn of a new AI (Artificial Intelligence) era, but frankly AI has been here since the 1890s when NCR created the first cash register to reduce theft by workers by tallying costs and recording total sales to benchmark against cash in the till. We then saw the introduction of vacuum tube computers in the 1930s which were used to break German ciphers during World War 2. In the 1950s IBM had punch cards to input data into their computers for processing. Going from manual data entry to automated reading was indeed revolutionary. The first ATM was launched in 1967 which allowed bank customers to obtain their own money as easy as they were obtaining chocolate bars from vending machines. The 1990s saw the rise of personal computers where every house matched the productivity of the office. Finally, the 2000s saw the rise of the smartphone where users were able to reduce their need for multiple devices and have apps at their fingertips that increased productivity, enhanced knowledge and of course, entertained then.
When we talk AI now, we are addressing the same concept of doing tasks, in an efficient manner, using technology, to reduce processing time and error. Essentially, identifying, documenting, optimizing and automating processes that reduce human interaction and errors, decrease task completion time, improve employee morale, and ultimately provide a more satisfied customer. As much as the world runs on the billions of dollars spent on custom software applications and GUI interfaces, high speed internet connections, cloud storage, and relational databases like SQL Server and Oracle, the livelihood of many companies still lives in the many distributed Excel files users retain to make life more efficient for themselves.
What is AI
AI is all about leveraging historical data to train a model and then make predictions based on user inputs matching the features used in the model. Even when punch cards were being used, the data and modeling was simpler, but to them it would have felt like AI. Now with the multitudes of data sets and the immense volume of data points from each data set, we can push the boundaries of what computers are capable of. Using GPUs (Graphical Processing Unit) which can un many parallel calculations instead of CPUs (Central Processing Unit) which excels at performing calculations sequentially data, capabilities of tomorrow seem endless. With immense data and unlimited compute power available via the cloud, it seems like only a matter of time before AI just dominates everything.
AI has always been with us but now the buzzword has solidified itself in the corporate world and in the personal world. Now much of tech will be leveraging the AI buzzword, but users will have to determine when mere coding ends and real intelligence begins. Companies should also be wary of using AI for everything when in fact, progress and evolution have been part of the tech space since its infancy. Undoubtedly, much progress will be made from the small steps, but certainly there is excitement for what major leaps of true AI bring to people.