By now, you must have noticed; Artificial Intelligence(AI) is a buzzword even outside of the tech industry. Dozens, maybe hundreds of startups globally, present themselves as AI. In other discussions, you might come across claims that humanity has not yet discovered AI. How can both of these claims be true?

Let’s take a deeper dive into what AI actually means in 2017, the significance of related terms such as:

Narrow AI

Artificial General Intelligence(AGI)

Conscious AI.

Narrow AI and Automation

The majority of currently active Artificial Intelligence is actually Narrow AI. Narrow AI is usually software that is automating a traditionally human activity, and in most cases it outperforms humans in efficiency and endurance. For example, in the present day we can ask our smartphones about the weather and expect accurate predictions.

There is no hard and fast line where automation became Narrow AI; mechanical tools lead to computers and software development has lead us to Narrow AI.

But now humans can do something Narrow AI can’t; we can learn new tasks.

We can solve problems we have never encountered before, using comparisons and creative thought. Some aspects of human creativity are not even fully understood yet, which makes them difficult to program. This video of Two Amazon Echos chatting with each other demonstrates this limitation of Narrow AI.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Machine Learning

For Artificial Intelligence to have complex, nuanced conversations that can pass for human, it needs to be able to solve new problems on the spot. It needs to interpret accents it has never heard before, vocabulary through context, and create sentences it has never had to express before.

AI with the ability to solve new problems is not Narrow. It can solve any problem in general.

Thus, it is called General AI or Artificial General Intelligence.

Machine Learning is a term that has been around since 1959, and means Narrow AI can rewrite software in response to new data. There are various ways machine learning is already in use, such as recognizing abnormal credit card use to notify users of potential identity theft.

Academic work in fields like psychology, neuroscience and philosophy are studying the way humans learn to shed light on processes that will allow machine learning to imitate the human learning process. Reinforcement Learning, based on human behavioural psychology, allows a Narrow AI to teach itself through trial-and-error and has had some recent success.

Google Deep Mind has created an AI that can learn to play video games by teaching itself through machine learning. New advancements in AGI development are happening fast and many people consider a truly General AI to be right around the corner.

Another way to think about AGI is to consider it an approach to novel problem solving through strategy. One of the biggest breakthroughs in Artificial General Intelligence was Deep Mind’s Alpha Go, the algorithm that beat humanity’s beat Go player.

Go is more complex than chess, with more possible board configurations than the total number of atoms in the visible universe. It would be impossible for AI to solve the problems in the game through brute force; Alpha Go taught itself strategies as it played.

Conscious AI, AKA True AI

Human consciousness is notoriously hard to define and explain. To create a consciousness that is software-based, humans would first need to understand consciousness. It is difficult to move toward a goal that is so unclearly defined.

Yet, most people assume this is the direction the technology is moving. To many people anything less than conscious AI is just very complex automation. Because of this controversy, those people might consider Conscious AI to be the only AI that should be called AI.

You might hear the term True AI. Some people think it is impossible, and until we can properly define consciousness that debate is far from settled.

Although no one has achieved self-aware AI yet, the race to be first has been compared to the nuclear arms race.

Some people, like Sam Harris or Elon Musk, have warned it could be dangerous because a consciousness with far more reliable memory and processing power is not something we can properly assess for safety.

Whether or not it is dangerous, the race to create Conscious AI is on. Google Deep Mind or Chinese search engine, Baidu, are both making headway on machine learning scenarios they claim will lead to Conscious AI.