Artificial intelligence and privacy protection: evolution of a risk into an opportunity

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the science involved in simulating human intelligence in machines. It involves re-creating certain functions of the human mind like “problem-solving” and “learning”. Any machine possessing artificial intelligence can perceive, understand, and analyze the stimulus in the environment and would be capable of undertaking action in response to the stimulus so that the chances of it achieving the in-built goals are maximized. To elaborate briefly on the history of Artificial Intelligence, this discipline was founded in 1956 at Dartmouth College. The students at the college could write programs to automate some functions in computers, like solving algebraic problems, proving theorems by logic, etc. Such research was then heavily funded by the Defence Department in the US. However, in 1974, due to problems in the field, research had slowed down, and the funding had to be cut. With the introduction and commercial success of the expert systems, which was a form of AI, projects on AI revived, and by 1985, AI market was valued at billion dollars. Even though funding had begun for academic research, it was stalled by the failure of the Lisp Machine in 1987. In the late 1990s and 21st century, AI research gained its reputation back when researchers narrowed their focus and found specific solutions for the problems posed by AI. This also involved heavy collaboration with other disciplines like economics and mathematics. After that, as the processing power, memory for storage of vast amounts of data, and algorithms improved in an accelerated fashion, machine learning and deep learning methods began to dominate, and artificial intelligence advanced with the solutions being deployed in products, achieving huge commercial success. Funding for academic research has also increased with the total publications in the field, which is a strong indicator for the research and has increased over 50% from 2015 to 2019.