Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt Freng, Principal of Jesus College Oxford, Chairman and Co-founder of the Open Data Institute (ODI), spoke prolifically on the subject of artificial intelligence (AI) at the final Lost Lecture last month. With a title like his you’d expect someone incredibly positive about the subject (and he is) but during the lecture it became more and more apparent that we have been (and continue to be) lied to. The truth is we’re nowhere near as close to full artificial intelligence as the media, Hollywood or indeed academics lead us to believe. However, we continue to see videos like this with hyperbolic statements plastered all over them:
Machine learning is and is not artificial intelligence
The problem isn’t the technology; it is people mis-labelling it. Most confuse what is deemed ‘machine learning’ for artificial intelligence. The difference is easy – machine learning counts as AI, but not all AI counts as machine learning. Machine learning is a subset of the artificial intelligence field, or, to put it another way, AI is the Hollywood stereotype of ‘HAL’ from ’2001: A Space Odyssey’; machine learning, on the other hand, is found in areas like fraud detection where observing patterns and applying rules is key to things improving or ‘learning’. When you confuse the two, things get messy–but the Hollywood notion of AI simply leads people to believe the field is a lot further along than it is. The truth is that artificial intelligence is decades away.
