The purpose of the book

Artificial intelligence has become a part of everyday conversation and our lives. It is considered a new electricity that is revolutionizing the world. Artificial intelligence is heavily invested in both industry and research. Technology leaders in artificial intelligence, such as Google, Facebook and Amazon, are growing and their dominant position is already causing concern. The United States has been a leading country in both research and application of artificial intelligence, but China, which invests enormously in the topic, is expected to overtake it, perhaps in the next few years. It is feared that artificial intelligence will take a lot of jobs and it is even believed that in the next few years or ten it will turn into super artificial intelligence smarter than humans — taking the power from mankind.

However, there is also a lot of hype in the current AI debate. Artificial intelligence is often talked about in a context that is not actual artificial intelligence, but regular evolution of digital technology towards more advanced functionalities. Combining different technologies enables the development of completely new types of applications that imitate intelligent activity, a futuristic example being humanoid robots that resemble humans. Artificial intelligence based on so-called deep learning has achieved impressive results in many problems, but its limits are already visible. Subjects related to artificial intelligence have been studied since the 1940s, and the field has already seen many ups and downs due to excessive expectations and related disappointments. All current solutions represent the so-called weak artificial intelligence.

The purpose of this book is to give a realistic picture of artificial intelligence, its current state, possibilities and limitations. The book complements and is a forward-looking continuation of the book we published at the end of 2021 “The challenges of artificial intelligence — From machine learning and machine vision to emotional artificial intelligence”.

At first, we present what artificial intelligence is and how it has developed, and what applications have been reached so far. The topics include the representation methods of artificial intelligence, learning and machine vision.

In recent months, the easy-to-use ChatGPT developed by Open AI has attracted a lot of attention. It has capability to dialogue, summarizing longer texts, responding to questions, and is even able to creat a birthday poem. However, its limitations are easy to see. ChatGPT is addressed in Chapters 9–10.

Next, we will look at how artificial intelligence research has tackled new challenges in order to get closer to strong artificial intelligence that resembles human intelligence. In this context we examine how the technology and approaches of artificial intelligence will change in the coming decades. We believe that AI is a human assistant — not a ruler.

We predict how artificial intelligence will change our society, people’s professions and hobbies by the 2050s. The points of view of the treatment include the expected changes in everyday life, hobbies, working life, teaching and learning, and tourism.

Much of the book’s content is based on our group’s research and the work of several of our researchers over the past decades, as the literature references and illustrations show. This book is published both in English and Finnish. We used AI program Google Translate for initial translations from Finnish to English and back.

Many thanks to everyone who contributed to the completion of the book! The positive feedback received from Alli Huovinen, Erkki Oja, Heikki Ailisto, Guoying Zhao, Heikki Kälviäinen, Joni Kämäräinen, Juha-Pekka Rusanen, Jukka Riekki, Li Liu, Maria Peura, Pekka Neittaanmäki, Pekka Pietikäinen, Zhuo Su, Ville Wittenberg, and Pirkko Ekdahl is gratefully acknowledged.

Oulu, May 9.5.2023

Matti Pietikäinen Olli Silvén