WHO CAN LEARN artificial intelligence
EVOLUTION OF AI:
Artificial Intelligence was the term coined by John McCarthy in a proposal submitted by himself, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon in the year 1956 when he held the first academic conference on the subject in Dartmouth College. Artificial Intelligence (AI), however, dates back as early as Greek Mythology which is considered Antiquity. You can find the very interesting and informative timeline of AI here.
No one can disprove on the computer’s logical ability, but people still ponder over the novelty that the computer can think. AI is the science used to create self-learning machines which can recognize human speech and objects, understand the pattern, learn from the pattern, and give quick and accurate solution to the problems, mimicking human intelligence. We are sure you would have used google maps for navigation and you would have been re-routed based on the traffic condition of the roads that lead to your destination. This is one simple example in our daily lives where AI has taken over. This is just a drop in the mighty ocean of AI.
Most of us confuse ourselves with the misconception that AI equals to “Robots.” Here, we are not really suggesting Robots are not AI, but saying they are just a minute segment of AI. AI comprises of vaster terms like symbolic learning, machine learning, and statistical learning with several subsegments such as Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech, Planning, Scheduling, and optimization, Vision, Robotics, and Expert System.
BREAKTHROUGH OF AI:
Now, in the year 2020, AI is literally everywhere! We now have the luxury of Smart Homes which are completely run by AI to include but not limited to home safety through automation, increase comfort, save energy, etc. The games we play on our mobile with responsive, adaptive, and intelligent behaviours; food-tech apps curating the landing page on the basis of customer location and showing up list of restaurants to each user’s taste preference; speech recognition and conversion to a machine-readable format; the voice assistants that provide us service through a particular application similar to Alexa or Siri; the “rediscover the day” feature by google photos; the bank apps on our phone and the performance of transactions with just a click of a button and totally paperless; these are just a few scenarios where we feel the presence of AI though not explicitly recognising it as AI.
We have been AI dependent for more than a decade and the dependency is bound to raise in the coming decades. We are getting so used to AI that we will find it impossible to live without it one fine day. The grasp of AI is widespread across various businesses and it has also become an invariable part of our life.
WHO CAN LEARN AI –
THE NON-PROGRAMMERS
It is widely, and if we may say, wrongly believed that AI is too technical with programming skill requirement and coding essentials. To put it simply, "to start with artificial intelligence, one should have natural intelligence". To learn AI the prerequisite would be to basically understand the problem. There is certainly no need to write codes to understand AI, at least initially. So, basically anybody with the skill to understand basic problems and analyse can learn AI. It is not restricted to “only engineers” as it was earlier believed. To learn AI, the basic and the important requisite is to think, not to code. Also, it requires people with great imagination without which one cannot imagine how various solutions to a problem would work. The biggest challenge to achieve in this process is to understand how a human brain works and not just to learn to make AI work and think like human brains.
Now coming to the point, artificial intelligence is a branch of science which like any other learning, just needs the basic passion and intent to learn it, the primary prerequisite of all learning processes. The knowledge to understand basic mathematical concepts will take you a long way in learning AI. One should also be willing to learn as they go, since AI is a very vast field and the learning is an ongoing process.
Once you set your foot into learning the AI, the first and foremost thing would be to learn the basic programming language, like R, and then build your way into learning languages like Python (which is the most preferred language for AI), Lisp, Java, etc.
WHO CAN LEARN AI - THE PROGRAMMERS
With all being said and done, the programmers with prior programming skills with or without prior work experience can make the best out of learning AI. They can take up an advanced course in AI as they already possess the knowledge of data structures, algorithms, calculus, probability, and statistics. To reiterate, you would also need to be very curious, inquisitive, and imaginative nonetheless. All the above attributes are not a prerequisite, but with such a passion, learning the new art of AI would be easily achievable.
The programmers who are in the industry’s workforce already would have understood the impact and the future of AI, and I’m sure would have a better vision of their future if they add the skill set of AI to their resumes.
People with engineering background can open the doors of their dream job by learning AI, knowing very well the future of AI in their respective industry.
CONCLUSION:
The doors of AI are wide open to people from varied industries and domains to enhance their skill set, better their career path, or even change their career path. AI is applied in automotive industry, manufacturing industry, banking sector, finance sector, education, human resources and so many varied domains. The opportunities are humongous and the breakthrough one would get after learning AI is immeasurable.
We would like to sum up saying that AI is a branch of science that can be learnt by anyone with the inclination to learn something new, someone who wants to dig deeper and understand it better, someone who is inquisitive about it, anyone with a great imaginative and analytical mind, someone with excellent coding and programming skills, anyone with a fast hand in mathematics and statistics.
We are concluding by reiterating the fact that it is a myth that only programmers or technically sound professionals can set their foot in learning AI. Since AI is a vast knowledge that can be applied or utilised in almost all the industries / sectors with data available, one would go a long way in the field of AI once they learn it.
We, at Infimind Institute, help achieve the dream and goal of programmers / non-programmers by conducting an academic course of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.