Artificial intelligence (AI): today and tomorrow

As Artificial Intelligence has only in recent years become a part of our day-to-day topics, we might tend to think that it is a young concept, subsequent to a recent discovery.

The pioneer of this discipline is Alan Turing, a British mathematician and logician, that, back in 1950 started advancing the idea that machines could be able to think.

Six year later, Dartmouth College math professor, John McCarthy, stated that “every aspect of learning of any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.”

“We use Artificial Intelligence many times during a day”

In this recent years, however, AI has been advancing much quicker than before, and today, we use Artificial Intelligence many times during a day — often, without even realizing it.

In brief, Artificial Intelligence is a specific area of computer science, that aims to create machines able not only to work and think, but also to act and react, as we, human beings, would.

Artificial Intelligence is commonly associated with the fear, from our side, that the more this discipline improves, the more human activities could be easily replaced by a robot.

For this reason, many people don’t want to recognize how AI can contribute greatly to the progresses of human life and cannot help to associate this discipline to the concept of unemployment.

Since most of us have still not realized how AI has already changed our lives, it is hard to recognize how significantly this technology has improved the way we work, and will continue doing so.

“Amazon, Apple and Google have already been implementing AI in production but we don’t notice that”

Some small companies and startups have been founded on the grounds of AI itself. Some other bigger firms and even Fortune 500 companies have decided to shift their activity by implementing AI in their current products and services.

Examples of this can be found in the tech giants of Apple, Amazon and Google.

Apple announced for the first time that it was going to move its first steps into AI by the end of 2016. This has been done, for example, with the research on techniques for images and handwriting recognition.

Amazon, on his side, has long benefited of the Artificial Intelligence algorithms to grow even more its e-commerce empire by making targeted and differentiated purchase recommendations.

In the end, Google has applied AI in many of its products, from Google Translate to TensorFlow, a library of files, announced in 2015, that facilitates computers decisions by breaking down the amount of data it stores.

What to expect from Artificial Intelligence, in this 2018?

It seems that it will affect our lives in even more tangible ways compared to what has been done until now.

Artificial Intelligence algorithms analyze quantities of data that until now had been represented a big concern for human beings, because very hard to examine in a fast and accurate way, avoiding major mistakes.

For this reason, the finance industry is one of the fields that has been benefitting the most from the advances that have been accomplished in this discipline, and seems to be full of potential for greater achievements in the nearest future.

As a matter of fact, very few industries are better suited and more promising for Artificial Intelligence application than finance, due to the extremely quantitative nature of this world and to the large amount of historical data that it presents.

Machine Learning, a specific branch of Artificial Intelligence, has been particularly useful in fraud detection, being able to successfully spot suspicious activities and behaviors, flagging them for security teams to monitor and analyze them.

Artificial Intelligence, also, has been predominant in training “robo-advisors”, algorithms that can calibrate a detailed financial portfolio according to the input that users give, stating their goals and risk tolerance.

In the nearest future, AI will be playing a key role in other aspect of the financial reality: it will improve banks’ customer service and conversational interfaces, it will strengthen data security and it will provide even more accurate data analysis.

For what concerns the trading activity, AI can be disruptive and beneficial for many different reasons.

“AI allows to completely eliminate traders’ worst enemy: their emotions”.

First of all, it allows to completely eliminate traders’ worst enemy: their emotions. Even the most expert traders are human beings, and can get nervous if things don’t go as expected, throwing in the trashcan a lot of time spent diligently monitoring the market’s movements and investigating into the different opportunities and possibilities.

Machines don’t have feelings and, most importantly, have the power to learn from their past experience. They record all the events, store them and elaborate them to be able to use that knowledge to better predict the future market shifts and events.

According to the information that they collect, computers are able to take extremely fast trading decisions, reacting as soon as the market moves, shifting in a different direction from what was expected, according to the scenery that appears to them.

As humans, this rapid response would not be possible because, no matter how experienced we are, we would still have to ponder our decision and to get the right evidences, in order to be completely sure we are making the right moves.

We are not machines, and our memory is not able to store a large amount of data, remembering them when the right time for using them comes.

Artificial Intelligence can monitor all the transactions that happen in real time, which, we can agree that is absolutely not possible for any person on the planet Earth.

It is a fact: Artificial Intelligence has entered in each one of our lives, and is quickly becoming indispensable for us.

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