Defining artificial intelligence

- [Instructor] Our society has arrived at a point where we can now spot the presence of AI all around us. It's present in your car, in the software that calculates your monthly insurance premium, in your search engine, and conversational chatbots such as ChatGPT. But let's take a step back and understand how artificial intelligence is different from natural intelligence. As human beings, you and I demonstrate signs of intelligence. We can acquire and store knowledge and then reason based on that stored knowledge. We can also take signals from an environment using our sensory organs such as eyes, ears, and touch. And finally, based on our collective learning, we can make rational decisions even in complex and conflicting situations. This is commonly known as natural intelligence. Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, is the intelligence demonstrated by the machines. Today we can teach machines to behave like us, which is to learn from data and make decisions. However, replicating the full-fledged cognitive behavior of humans is still a future goal of AI. The good news is that the science and engineering community have come up with a more practical way to harness the power of AI. When approaching AI to solve most common industry and security problems, we usually refer to the notion of intelligent agents. But hold on. What is an intelligent agent? An intelligent agent is a machine, software, or system. When you assign a goal to an intelligent agent, it does everything possible to maximize the probability of a goal completion by sensing, learning, and by acting. For example, a commonly used household floor cleaning robot by no means exhibits the general intelligence that we humans do. But for the task it is assigned to perform, which of course is cleaning, an AI enabled robot can sense its surroundings, create a map of the floor, and learn to make corrections should a change in the baseline map occur. Now let's pivot from the household gadget to a more recent phenomena in natural language processing, ChatGPT is a conversational natural language processing tool that is empowered with artificial intelligence. This tool can have an intelligent written conversation with humans, respond to questions, write essays, write white papers, and even write source code. Possibilities are limitless. Well, you may find it straightforward to see the impact of AI in these simple examples, but to really appreciate the emerging role of AI in the field of cybersecurity, you must start with the current state of information security. You hear about a new security breach and loss of confidential data every few days, and you may wonder how in the world these organizations with hefty resources at their disposal are still losing the battle. On the other hand, adversaries continue to get past the organization's barriers and still continue exposing data. Our society and technology environment have been rapidly evolving. I'm certain that over the last decade you have personally watched or experienced the migration of your personal data, such as financial and health records and social interactions, all manifest into digital formats on your smartphone or in the cloud. And what's profound is that the migration is accelerating not just in your personal data, but in the enterprise space as well. You don't have to be a technology company to take advantage of digital transformation. In my opinion, there's not a single industry today that is not investing in transforming its processes, be it in healthcare, transportation, or textiles. The world of sensors and industrial devices that was off the grid without connectivity is now being connected to an enterprise network through the internet of things. This perfect storm has resulted in a massive explosion in the volume of data that organizations are now required to protect. Traditional approaches that a team of security professionals applied earlier to protect their data are now under stress and are barely catching up to match the demand. So how can artificial intelligence take some burden off and assist you and your organization in protecting critical assets?