Masdar Smart City and Robotics - GineersNow Engineering Magazine Masdar: The Future of Sustainable City in Abu Dhab | Page 23

WHAT HAPPENS
WHEN COMPUTERS
START TO LEARN
ON THEIR OWN
How do computers learn something new? One might say
programming, but it involves telling the computer every
little step that it needs to perform in order to complete the
new task. You need to know the steps yourself in order to
teach the computer. However, what do you do when you
don’t know the steps yourself?
This is where machine learning comes in. With this
technology, the computer is made to learn things and
processes on its own. Jeremy Howard is a specialist in this
field. He gave a TED Talk to show how much machine
learning has evolved and how it will begin to affect the
world at large.
The first example of machine learning took place in 1956
when a guy named Arthur Samuel wanted his computer to
be good enough at checkers to beat him. His solution was
to make the computer keep playing checkers against itself
and learning from the games. Suffice to say, it worked
so well that the computer ended up defeating the state
champion of Connecticut.
Today, examples of machine learning
are all around us. The most common
application is the search engine. Google
makes use of machine learning to get
its search engine locate the information
that you actually want. Remember those
recommendations shown in Amazon?
Those recommendations are provided by
machine learning algorithms. Pretty nifty,
right? Well, it can be creepy too like those
friend recommendations in LinkedIn.
Take for example the team which created
a computer program for automatic drug
discovery. What’s cool is that the team
did not have any knowledge in biology or
medicine. They simply used what is called
deep learning. Deep learning allows
computers to actually learn Chinese.
Now, what does that mean for people
and their jobs? We might be heading into
another Industrial Revolution, except, the
results might not pretty. After all, deep
learning will allow computers to perform
80% of human jobs easily.
JULY 2016
Future Cities & Robotics
23