Team Partners Telecommunications

The three levels of AI...

Posted on Dec 20, 2023

We all think we know what Artificial Intelligence is, but for most of us, what we’ve learned has been picked up incidentally, as peripheral knowledge as we’ve read about something else. This month we thought we’d have a closer look at the game-changer that is AI, because if there’s one thing for certain, it’s that AI will influence every part of our lives, if it’s not doing so already.

There are three levels or classifications of AI. The ‘lowest’, known as Weak AI comprises those programs that focus on doing one basic job. Examples of these in our daily lives are Siri and Alexa, Google maps and Apple autocorrect, but also Spotify’s shuffle capability and email spam filters. Set a Weak AI program a task and it gets on with it.

Strong AI is a different thing altogether. Strong AI, or more to the point ‘perfecting’ Strong AI, is the holy grail of all developers. Strong AI can understand and learn any intellectual task that a human can and, as yet it remains a theoretical form of AI. Also known as Artificial General Intelligence, AGI, its most defining feature will be that it has a self-aware consciousness that makes it capable of solving problems, learning, and planning for the future. There are those who say that such levels of AI cannot be achieved, but then even defining intelligence or understanding has its problems...here’s a brief description of one of the tests used, this one known as the Chinese Room Argument.

“Computation is defined purely formally or syntactically, whereas minds have actual mental or semantic contents, and we cannot get from syntactical to the semantic just by having the syntactical operations and nothing else…A system, me, for example, would not acquire an understanding of Chinese just by going through the steps of a computer program that simulated the behaviour of a Chinese speaker.”

The third level, Super AI remains, as you might imagine, a concept. Super AI, when it arrives, will do anything a human can, surpassing human intelligence and capability and taking progress, well, who knows where?

As with anything else in life, AI has both advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are clear, human error can be obviated in, for example, robotic surgical procedures, with the robot learning from the experience of each completed procedure; risks can be removed, imagine an AI operated bomb disposal machine, learning on the job. Then think of the chatbot on a website, ready to respond 24/7, there are dozens of advantages...

And disadvantages? At the moment there’s the high cost of investment in creating machines that can simulate human intelligence, there’s the perceived lack of creativity in that AI can only work with inputted data. Then there’s the question of ethics and lack of emotion, which raises the question as to whether various world governments are already using AI in their decision making.

Rather more difficult to stack up are perceived and oft-repeated disadvantages such as job stealing and the removal of the need for humans to think. 

This question on advantages and disadvantages, pros and cons apply to every sector and industry. In medicine the possibilities are immense, with the analysis of huge quantities of patient data making diagnosis easier and quicker, all at the risk of this data being misused. In marketing we already see deeply targeted, even individual, campaigns based on data analysis. In education the possibility exists for highly individualised student learning paths, again with the risk of data being misused. In transport we’re already seeing driverless cars, whether or not you’d consider this an advantage or not, but more importantly AI is able to keep analysing traffic flow, train movements, ‘plane schedules, the weather and every other consideration to keep things moving,

Are we being taken over by machines? It depends on who you ask. There is certainly a frightening inevitability to the way things are moving, but then maybe a more frightening inevitability is presented by climate change. Perhaps AI could be an answer to that.