Artificial Intelligence... Machine Learning... Algorithms... Pause...lay people?

I knew Google used algorithms and you read about these things and as a person not particularly well versed in data science let alone AI you just think, 'Yeah it's automated, it's impressive, does stuff without you having to do anything.' Honestly when you say AI, people firstly and mostly think of "Robots" and they think Arnie and Terminator. Let's be honest, that is what the connotation of Artificial Intelligence is. It is a person that is not a person but looks like a person and almost acts like a person, but kind of like someone with limited charisma.

I am doing more and more work with machine learning and deep learning and understanding that they have a different meaning (and importantly scope) to artificial intelligence. Microsoft Azure give a good explanation of the differences from AI to Machine Learning. For brevity and our purposes here AI is the ability to mimic human thinking and logic - our intelligence - and machine learning is the process of computers learning without instruction, which as you would see is a part of or application of AI.

So when I ask myself "What is AI?" Artificial Intelligence makes me feel humbled. Okay, it also makes me feel dumber.

By way of example, beyond just a Google search, every time we search for a location, the geo-location data interacts with your stored data as well as Google's data and processes all of the data and provides us with information and gives us estimates of the time it will take to get from Point A to Point B, and that is in real-time, so when there are traffic jams or roadwork, that data is updated and analysed and estimations of time are recalculated for us. We might very well take the end result for granted as consumers, but that is some remarkable automation at play.

The same is being used for a myriad of other business applications, such as Amazon Web Services and other consumer facing providers, where AI is not so much an invisible person talking to you so much as providing data-assisted (AI-assisted) operations to make things easier. Google's Home and Amazon's Alexa may at times feel so impressive that they feel invasive and taking it too far, but that is ultimately what they are attempting to do - make our lives easier with technology.

So the question I am really getting to is "how do I as a lay person, get a hold of some algorithms and put this to work?" This seems to be the thing that even the Blockchain industry has now kept the general consumer and non-technical market from. Unlike the some nearing 20,000 crypto tokens on the market now as per www.CoinMarketCap.com. The artificial intelligence industry, actually does not exist for consumers, it has stayed hidden behind the B2B business user market.

For example, Renaissance Technologies was able to use artificial intelligence which effectively adopted both predictive systems and other algorithmic applications to essentially stay ahead of the financial markets and be able to buy and sell at the right time in milli-seconds making micro-profits on transactions that would be effected over and over again. With a winning formula like that, why sell it to consumers so they could have the benefit as well right? Plus that would just undermine their own proprietary software. So it follows that the best way to understand the AI industry is to delve into it and trial using it for business and consumer applications.

My takeaway from all of this is that in all the time I have dealt with AI as a project manager, I have really not even begun to appreiciate the potential, omnipotence and beauty of this still nascent industry, because I have not properly indulged myself in the technical aspects. My plan going forward is to look at some of the business and consumer problems in the market, look at how an artificial intelligence application can solve or assist the solving of thosse problems, actually put together algorithms, execute them in practical applications, and see where that takes me.