Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Knowledge engineering is a core part of AI research. Machines can often act and react like humans only if they have abundant information relating to the world. Artificial intelligence must have access to objects, categories, properties and relations between all of them to implement knowledge engineering. Initiating common sense, reasoning and problem-solving power in machines is a difficult and tedious task.

Machine learning is also a core part of AI. Learning without any kind of supervision requires an ability to identify patterns in streams of inputs, whereas learning with adequate supervision involves classification and numerical regressions.

Classification determines the category an object belongs to and regression deals with obtaining a set of numerical input or output examples, thereby discovering functions enabling the generation of suitable outputs from respective inputs. Mathematical analysis of machine learning algorithms and their performance is a well-defined branch of theoretical computer science often referred to as computational learning theory.

Machine perception deals with the capability to use sensory inputs to deduce the different aspects of the world, while computer vision is the power to analyze visual inputs with a few sub-problems such as facial, object and gesture recognition.

Robotics is also a major field related to AI. Robots require intelligence to handle tasks such as object manipulation and navigation, along with sub-problems of localization, motion planning and mapping.

Techopedia explains Artificial Superintelligence (ASI)
Most experts would agree that societies have not yet reached the point of artificial superintelligence. In fact, engineers and scientists are still trying to reach a point that would be considered full artificial intelligence, where a computer could be said to have the same cognitive capacity as a human. Although there have been developments like IBM's Watson supercomputer beating human players at Jeopardy, and assistive devices like Siri engaging in primitive conversation with people, there is still no computer that can really simulate the breadth of knowledge and cognitive ability that a fully developed adult human has. The Turing test, developed decades ago, is still used to talk about whether computers can come close to simulating human conversation and thought, or whether they can trick other people into thinking that a communicating computer is actually a human.

However, there is a lot of theory that anticipates artificial superintelligence coming sooner rather than later. Using examples like Moore's law, which predicts an ever-increasing density of transistors, experts talk about singularity and the exponential growth of technology, in which full artificial intelligence could manifest within a number of years, and artificial superintelligence could exist in the 21st century.