My lecture at Mediterranean University on December 19, 2018. This week, I gave a lecture at Mediterranean University to an awesome class of 3rd year IT students. Before I started, I asked them to share what field of software engineering interested them the most. Most of them responded with front-end, back-end, or full stack software engineering, whereas data science/ artificial intelligence was only mentioned as a casual interest by a few students. I explained that on my team, our work spans back to front end development, but that my domain was primarily data science.
During my lecture, I told them about some of the data science projects I've done at IBM. Both during and afterwards, their questions indicated that they really understood the fundamentals of data science and also seemed quite interested. Machine learning hasn't really found a place in IT over here, but I think it should! There's a bunch of buzz words in machine learning, but I think some of the terms can be off-putting and have negative connotations, in part due to Hollywood's personification of artificial intelligence as evil. Indeed, many of the questions from the students were "Is AI going to replace everyone's jobs?", "Why is AI always portrayed as a bad thing in movies?", and "How do you know AI won't acquire the ability to think because I saw something where it solved a problem it was even asked to solve...."? These questions betray a fear of AI, but I postulated that it's just the fear of the unknown! For AI to be useful, it's always going need to humans to tell it what to do; it flourishes with specific, repetitive tasks. Just like production factories have replaced some manual jobs, so will and should AI. But so too it is a technology that will advance our knowledge and productivity. And the creativity, emotion, context that us mortals possess - that is something computers will never be able to bring to life. Instead, AI should be seen as a tool, as something we can use to make our lives better and to enable us to focus on the problems that need our creative problem solving and human touch!
Here's a great article that also agrees that AI is not taking over the world anytime soon.
During my lecture, I told them about some of the data science projects I've done at IBM. Both during and afterwards, their questions indicated that they really understood the fundamentals of data science and also seemed quite interested. Machine learning hasn't really found a place in IT over here, but I think it should! There's a bunch of buzz words in machine learning, but I think some of the terms can be off-putting and have negative connotations, in part due to Hollywood's personification of artificial intelligence as evil. Indeed, many of the questions from the students were "Is AI going to replace everyone's jobs?", "Why is AI always portrayed as a bad thing in movies?", and "How do you know AI won't acquire the ability to think because I saw something where it solved a problem it was even asked to solve...."? These questions betray a fear of AI, but I postulated that it's just the fear of the unknown! For AI to be useful, it's always going need to humans to tell it what to do; it flourishes with specific, repetitive tasks. Just like production factories have replaced some manual jobs, so will and should AI. But so too it is a technology that will advance our knowledge and productivity. And the creativity, emotion, context that us mortals possess - that is something computers will never be able to bring to life. Instead, AI should be seen as a tool, as something we can use to make our lives better and to enable us to focus on the problems that need our creative problem solving and human touch!
Here's a great article that also agrees that AI is not taking over the world anytime soon.
Dangit, that's why you wear heels instead of sneakers. :P Also, Montenegrins are tall!!!
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