Why do we need to study AI?

AI can impact every aspect of our lives. The field of AI tries to understand patterns and behaviors of entities. With AI, we want to build smart systems and understand the concept of intelligence as well. The intelligent systems that we construct are very useful in understanding how an intelligent system like our brain goes about constructing another intelligent system.

Let's look at how our brain processes information:

Figure 1: Basic brain components

Compared to some other fields such as mathematics or physics that have been around for centuries, AI is relatively in its infancy. Over the last couple of decades, AI has produced some spectacular products such as self-driving cars and intelligent robots that can walk. Based on the direction in which we are heading, it's obvious that achieving intelligence will have a great impact on our lives in the coming years.

We can't help but wonder how the human brain manages to do so...