Artificial Intelligence — renowned in short as A. I — has emerged from a desire to have a form of intelligence to emulate human neural capacity. With the rapidly advancing computing technologies, the world has seen for the first time the dictation of human’s will to machinery taking deep roots in daily activities such as facial recognition, self-driving car, the humanoid robot, and so on. It was a fresh atmosphere of optimism in the belief that AI will be the ultimate delegation of human beings.

Can it replace human intelligence?

Before we dive deeper into seeking the ultimate truth, we might as well define what is it to be a human. Apparently, from the dawn of civilization to the industrial revolution, the human level of understanding has altered dramatically. The intuitive way in the past to resolve problems was through the violent mean resulting in humans battling against each other. But from time to time, we learn to talk, understand each other, feel compassion, sympathize, and feel remorse for any wrongdoing. All of those were human conscience that evolved and developed to push for a better way of life. However, the development wasn’t done in a generation. It took a tremendous amount of time for humans to realize the objective. The practice to pass experiences to the latter generation in the form of inscription or written manuscript has begun what’s called The Accumulative Acquisition of Knowledge which remained squarely within the confinement of humans’ basis of thinking.

So what is Artificial Intelligence?

The terms were pretty much self-explanatory — the intelligence entity that was engineered to serve a specific purpose. It was derived from the field of mathematics that formulate certain procedures to model partial aspects of humans’ way of thinking that will ultimately inspire how the computer would solve the problem. For instance, we used to identify a bird by certain distinguishing features such as feathers, a pair of wings, beaks, etc. The knowledge was then inscribed and passed down through generations. Transforming the knowledge from readable human text to the mathematical algorithm and computing codes is widely known as Programming The Intelligence. Subsequently, we got an AI that could — in theory — identify birds independent of humans’ judgment. However, it took years of effort and research to come up with such sophisticated knowledge and experience to guide the computer to do so.

Can AI exist entirely on its own?

The idea of autonomous robots has again reinvigorated the belief in the future of AI to replace human beings. Although autonomous robots are trained to make decisions independent of human directives, they still need human support in terms of deployment, consultation, or even manual controlling. Let’s take the curiosity rover for example, of course, it worked on behalf of human beings for exploration on Mars. It collected data, analyzed Martian terrain, and answer the ultimate question of whether there was life on the red planet. However, the robot is said to be objective in that it only serves some specific purposes to exist on its own. The microcontroller chip inside holds only certain instructions for the corresponding events that might occur and affect the robot on Mar in its lifetime. What if a giant asteroid suddenly hit Mars like it hit the earth in ancient times that might destroy the rover, how would the rover then respond? Was it programmed to respond to such events? Can it realize what’s happening and take a wise course of action? This indeed would require a General-Purpose Artificial Intelligence — or put it more accurately, an Artificial Human Being. We can draw the conclusion that Artificial Intelligence and humans coexist in a joint effort as each entity needs the other to fulfill its respective tasks.