From the course: AI Basics: What Every Professional Needs to Know

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The paradigm shift: Rules vs. data

The paradigm shift: Rules vs. data

From the course: AI Basics: What Every Professional Needs to Know

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The paradigm shift: Rules vs. data

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Let's stop talking about the hype and start talking about the reality instead. Let's take a look under the hood and get a peek at how AI actually works. Spoiler alert, it's surprisingly simple, no PhD required. The first thing you need to understand is that AI represents a fundamental shift in how we tell computers what to do. It's a change from rules-based programming to data-based learning. For the last 70 years, if you wanted a computer to do something, you had to write a rule. If you wanted to play a game, you wrote, well, if the ball hits the wall, then bounce. If you wanted it to process taxes, you wrote, if income is over $50,000, then tax rate is 20%, stuff like that. We call this traditional programming. It's great, but it has a limit. You can only program what you can describe with well-defined rules. So how would you write a rule for recognizing a cat? It could be if it has ears and whiskers, but then, wait, a dog has ears and whiskers. Or then maybe we could say, if it…

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