You would never ask the same question when it comes to time travel or some prophecy, would you? We have normalized the amazing possibilities brought about by artificial intelligence too easily and too early. The discipline clearly deserved some more love – some more awestruck jaws, some more wows, and ahs. Enough of this pseudo nostalgia about AI; trust me; this big guy is far from its prime. What I really want to talk about is Tesla, its autonomous cars and how it has ensured supremacy in the market for the same.

The AI-powered world

We hear this phrase – AI-powered – in the ads of almost every piece of gadget nowadays. It is often quite misleading; an alarm clock that remembers when to ring the alarm on which day of the week or a toothbrush that starts beeping after you have swayed it around your teeth a certain number of times is definitely smart (yes, these are real things) but they do not require artificial intelligence. If you want to know what AI is, you must take a look at the cars launched by Tesla motors. These cars are learning the nuances of driving while they are driven by human drivers. The thousands of cars that are running around the world are potential fully autonomous cars that are basically evolving all by themselves with the help of unsupervised learning.

AI and unsupervised learning

You are probably familiar with terms like machine learning and deep learning. Machine learning is what helps an IT system construct artificial knowledge on the basis of experience. This experience that I refer to is basically the patterns drawn from extensive amounts of data which is run through algorithms. This is supervised learning where the data is used to find the solution to certain problems. But things work differently in the case of unsupervised learning. Here you do not really control the data that flows into the system and the learning is not directed by certain problems.

Take for example the autonomous cars by Tesla. They are acquiring data when they are being driven by human drivers; they are also recording the reaction of other drivers when the car approaches other vehicles.

How AI affects us

Let us not get into the argument about whether AI is going to disrupt the job market too badly. We can, instead look at the things AI has already achieved. Speech recognition and textual analysis are at an incredible stage at the moment. The smallest of gadgets are coming with these technologies. These, so far, are the primary areas of AI influence as far as the Indian market is concerned. Artificial intelligence courses in India are facilitating a lot of youngsters to delve deep into the subject and we can expect a rise in AI innovation from India in the near future.