Introduction

You can hardly avoid encountering mentions of AI today. You see AI in the movies, in books, in the news, and online. AI is part of robots, self-driving cars, drones, medical systems, online shopping sites, and all sorts of other technologies that affect your daily life in so many ways.

Many pundits are burying you in information (and disinformation) about AI, too. Some see AI as cute and fuzzy; others see it as a potential mass murderer of the human race. The problem with being so loaded down with information in so many ways is that you struggle to separate what’s real from what is simply the product of an overactive imagination. Much of the hype about AI originates from the excessive and unrealistic expectations of scientists, entrepreneurs, and businesspersons. Artificial Intelligence For Dummies is the book you need if you feel as if you really don’t know anything about a technology that purports to be an essential element of your life.

Using various media as a starting point, you might notice that most of the useful technologies are almost boring. Certainly, no one gushes over them. AI is like that: so ubiquitous as to be humdrum. You’re even using AI in some way today; in fact, you probably rely on AI in many different ways — you just don’t notice it because it’s so mundane. Artificial Intelligence For Dummies makes you aware of these very real and essential uses of AI. A smart thermostat for your home may not sound very exciting, but it’s an incredibly practical use for a technology that has some people running for the hills in terror.

Of course, Artificial Intelligence For Dummies also covers the really cool uses for AI. For example, you may not know there is a medical monitoring device that can actually predict when you might have a heart problem, but such a device exists. AI powers drones, drives cars, and makes all sorts of robots possible. You see AI used today in all sorts of space applications, and AI figures prominently in all the space adventures humans will have tomorrow.

In contrast to many books on the topic, Artificial Intelligence For Dummies also tells you the truth about where and how AI can’t work. In fact, AI will never be able to engage in certain essential activities and tasks, and won’t be able to do other ones until far into the future. Some people try to tell you that these activities are possible for AI, but Artificial Intelligence For Dummies tells you why they can’t work, clearing away all the hype that has kept you in the dark about AI. One takeaway from this book is that humans will always be important. In fact, if anything, AI makes humans even more important because AI helps humans excel in ways that you frankly might not be able to imagine.

About This Book

Artificial Intelligence For Dummies starts by helping you understand AI, especially what AI needs to work and why it has failed in the past. You also discover the basis for some of the issues with AI today and how those issues might prove to be nearly impossible to solve in some cases. Of course, along with the issues, you also discover the fixes for some problems and consider where scientists are taking AI in search of answers.

For a technology to survive, it must have a group of solid applications that actually work. It also must provide a payback to investors with the foresight to invest in the technology. In the past, AI failed to achieve critical success because it lacked some of these features. AI also suffered from being ahead of its time: True AI needed to wait for the current hardware to actually succeed. Today, you can find AI used in various computer applications and to automate processes. It’s also relied on heavily in the medical field and to help improve human interaction. AI is also related to data analysis, machine learning, and deep learning. Sometimes these terms can prove confusing, so one of the reasons to read Artificial Intelligence For Dummies is to discover how these technologies interconnect.

AI has a truly bright future today because it has become an essential technology. This book also shows you the paths that AI is likely to follow in the future. The various trends discussed in this book are based on what people are actually trying to do now. The new technology hasn’t succeeded yet, but because people are working on it, it does have a good chance of success at some point.

To make absorbing the concepts even easier, this book uses the following conventions:

• Web addresses appear in monofont. If you’re reading a digital version of this book on a device connected to the Internet, note that you can click the web address to visit that website, like this: www.dummies.com.
• Words in italics are defined inline as special terms that you should remember. You see these words used (and sometimes misused) in many different ways in the press and other media, such as movies. Knowing the meaning of these terms can help you clear away some of the hype surrounding AI.

Icons Used in This Book

As you read this book, you see icons in the margins that indicate material of interest (or not, as the case may be).This section briefly describes each icon in this book.

Tips are nice because they help you save time or perform some task without a lot of extra work. The tips in this book are time-saving techniques or pointers to resources that you should try in order to get the maximum benefit from learning about AI.

We don’t want to sound like angry parents or some kind of maniacs, but you should avoid doing anything marked with a Warning icon. Otherwise, you could find that you engage in the sort of disinformation that has people terrified of AI today.

Whenever you see this icon, think advanced tip or technique. You might find these tidbits of useful information just too boring for words, or they could contain the solution you need to create or use an AI solution. Skip these bits of information whenever you like.

If you don’t get anything else out of a particular chapter or section, remember the material marked by this icon. This text usually contains an essential process or a bit of information that you must know to interact with AI successfully.

Beyond the Book

This book isn’t the end of your AI discovery experience; it’s really just the beginning. We provide online content to make this book more flexible and better able to meet your needs. That way, as John receives email from you, we can address questions and tell you how updates to AI or its associated technologies affect book content. In fact, you gain access to all these cool additions:

• Cheat sheet: You remember using crib notes in school to make a better mark on a test, don’t you? You do? Well, a cheat sheet is sort of like that. It provides you with some special notes about tasks that you can do with AI that not everyone else knows. You can find the cheat sheet for this book by going to www.dummies.com and searching for Artificial Intelligence For Dummies Cheat Sheet. The cheat sheet contains really neat information, such as the meaning of all those strange acronyms and abbreviations associated with AI, machine learning, and deep learning.

• Updates: Sometimes changes happen. For example, we might not have seen an upcoming change when we looked into our crystal balls during the writing of this book. In the past, that simply meant that the book would become outdated and less useful, but you can now find updates to the book by going to www.dummies.com and searching this book’s title.

  In addition to these updates, check out the blog posts with answers to readers’ questions and for demonstrations of useful book-related techniques at http://blog.johnmuellerbooks.com/.

Where to Go from Here

It’s time to start discovering AI and see what it can do for you. If you don’t know anything about AI, start with Chapter 1. You may not want to read every chapter in the book, but starting with Chapter 1 helps you understand AI basics that you need when working through other places in the book.

If your main goal in reading this book is to build knowledge of where AI is used today, start with Chapter 5. The materials in Part 2 help you see where AI is used today.

Readers who have a bit more advanced knowledge of AI can start with Chapter 9. Part 3 of this book contains the most advanced material that you’ll encounter. If you don’t want to know how AI works at a low level (not as a developer, but simply as someone interested in AI), you might decide to skip this part of the book.

Okay, so you want to know the super fantastic ways in which people are either using AI today or will use AI in the future. If that’s the case, start with Chapter 12. All of Parts 4 and 5 show you the incredible ways in which AI is used without forcing you to deal with piles of hype as a result. The information in Part 4 focuses on hardware that relies on AI, and the material in Part 5 focuses more on futuristic uses of AI.