Foreword

Artificial intelligence has become a part of everyday conversation and our lives. It is considered as the new electricity that is revolutionizing the world. Artificial intelligence is heavily invested in both industry and academy. Artificial intelligence technology leaders like Google, Facebook and Amazon are growing and their dominance is already causing concern. The United States has been a leading country in both research and application of artificial intelligence, but China, which is investing heavily in the topic, is expected to surpass it in the next few years. Artificial intelligence is feared to take a lot of jobs, and even in the next few decades, it is believed to become super-intelligent — and to take power from people.

However, there is also a lot of hype in the current artificial intelligence debate. There is often talk of artificial intelligence even in a context that does not actually represent actual artificial intelligence, but rather the regular evolution of digital technology towards more advanced functionalities. The combination of different technologies enables the development of completely new types of applications that mimic intelligent operations, humanoid robots being futuristic examples. Artificial intelligence based on so-called deep learning has achieved impressive results in many problems, but its limits are already visible. Artificial intelligence has been under research since the 1940s, and the industry has seen many ups and downs due to over-expectations and related disappointments that have followed.

The purpose of this book is to give a realistic picture of artificial intelligence, its history, its potential and limitations. We believe that artificial intelligence is a helper — not a ruler of humans. We begin by describing what artificial intelligence in the true sense of the word is and how it has evolved over the decades. After fundamentals, we explain the importance of massive data for the current mainstream of artificial intelligence. The most common representations for artificial intelligence, methods, and machine learning are covered. In addition, the main application areas are introduced.

Computer vision has long been central to the development of artificial intelligence. The book provides a general introduction to computer vision, and includes an exposure to the results and applications of our own research. Emotions are central to human intelligence, but little use has been made in artificial intelligence.

In this book we present the basics of emotional intelligence and our own research on the topic.

We discuss super-intelligence that transcends human understanding, explaining why such achievement seems impossible on the basis of present knowledge, and how artificial intelligence could be improved. Finally, a summary is made of the current state of artificial intelligence and what to do in the future.

In most countries, the growing importance of artificial intelligence skills has been noted over the last few years. In the appendix of the book, we look at the development of artificial intelligence education, especially from the perspective of contents at our own university.

This book is based on the authors’ 40 years of experience in cut-ting-edge research, teaching and application of artificial intelligence and machine vision to a variety of problems. The book is intended for a wide range of readers: high school students, higher-education students, researchers, professionals working in industry or elsewhere, anyone interested in artificial intelligence — including the decision-makers.

Much of the content of the book is based on the work of our research group over the past decades, as evidenced by literary references and artwork. The first edition in Finnish was published in November 2019. We received valuable content suggestions for it from Satu Räsänen, Janne Heikkilä, Guoying Zhao and Tapio Seppänen, Li Liu, Tuomas Holmberg and Jie Chen assisted with the illustration. We also got useful comments from Pirkko Ekdahl and Tuukka Bogdanoff. We are grateful to all those who supported us in the completion of the book! For this English edition Google Translate based on artificial intelligence was used to produce the first translated versions of the text for most of the chapters, and then edited by the authors. Additional material written for the second Finnish edition to be published in early 2022 is also included.

Matti Pietikäinen

Olli Silvén