Genius Makers by Cade Metz Book Analysis

The book Genius Makers by Cade Metz is a book about how artificial intelligence is created and how it began in the 1950s, starting as an idea of recreating the neural networks of the human brain into a computer. The feat that the engineers were trying to accomplish was to train a computer to recognize objects and respond to them accordingly without actually being programmed to do so, in other words, the computer is being programmed to learn and to program itself. If this idea succeeded, it would be revolutionary as there would be thousands of different things that could come out of this. But back in the 1950s, this idea was too difficult to accomplish, for example the Perceptron, a machine that was based on a mathematical system on the brain and was capable of learning basic skills back in the 1950s, was trained to recognize which of the cards that were presented to it was marked, and after a few errors in the beginning it soon made no mistakes and identified the marked card every time. However, if it was trained to recognize letters the handwriting of different people was just too big of a burden on the machine, and it failed to do so. This was understandable as the concept of AI was just emerging, and for anything to be successful it would have to overcome hundreds of obstacles along the road. The Perceptron was one of the first neural networks, and it would mark the beginning of the rise of artificial intelligence. 

The idea of neural networks was vastly overhyped and people saw many futures of it. Some people thought that it could push humanity forward, while other people think that the idea is too dangerous and could make the machines more powerful than humans, thus escaping our control. I personally think AI is revolutionary because looking at it right now it makes our lives so much easier, and has become a part of our lives that could not be removed. For example photo recognition, it is very useful since you just point your camera at something and it tells you what it is. Even though overhyped, the concept achieved very few accomplishments until the 21st century when computing power greatly increased. Then artificial intelligence became powerful, and many people and companies saw the great potential that AI holds, including the USA’s Google and Microsoft, and the Chinese tech giant Baidu. But I think that calling it artificial intelligence might be a bit of a mistake, as the machines don’t actually think, but instead they are great at recognizing different patterns, and responding to those patterns by accessing a humongous database and finding the one that responds the best. This makes the idea of AI taking over the world not possible. And AI usually specializes in one specific area, for example, an AI that specializes in chess, however unbeatable it is at it, cannot play any other games such as jeopardy since it has no databases for it and doesn’t know how to recognize the different patterns in the game. But undoubtedly AI is very powerful and could provide humans with great help and many powerful nations and companies such as China, Amazon, and Tesla invest lots of time and money into it, hoping to make their company/nation more powerful.