Artificial Intelligence is definitely the next big thing. However, programmers still find it hard to understand what A.I. really is and how they can use that bring their programming career to the next level.
AI is a broad topic ranging from simple calculators to self-steering technology to something that might radically change the future.
The primary goals of AI include deduction and reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, natural language processing (NLP), learning, perception, and the ability to manipulate and move objects. Long-term goals of AI research include achieving Creativity, Social Intelligence, and General (human level) Intelligence.
AI has heavily influenced different sectors that we may not recognize. Ray Kurzweil says “Many thousands of AI applications are deeply embedded in the infrastructure of every industry.” John McCarthy, one of the founders of AI, once said that “as soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore.”
(Source: https://www.hackerearth.com/blog/developers/artificial-intelligence-101-how-to-get-started/)
But… Where to start learning A.I.? How you, as a programmer, can incorporate A.I. opportunities in your career?
Is there a better programming language to learn artificial intelligence? Is there a specific technology you should learn?
Watch this video and find out!
Transcript Of The Video:
John Sonmez: Today's video, we're going to be talking about how to get into AI, is it the next big thing? How do you get into it? I'm John from simpleprogrammer.com, on this channel I teach you soft skills. We focus at Simple Programmer on teaching soft skills. That's career management skills, marketing yourself, getting that higher salary, just becoming an overall better, well adjusted person and living a happy life.
“Hello John. I'm new to programming, just learning the fundamentals, and I get a lot of offers to join bootcamps and I got a lot, a little confused. Let me explain. Many people told me AI is next big thing, and yet when I search for jobs for AI I always seem to find more full stack dev needed for AI. AI is in a class of its own in user related data science, and full stack is front end plus back end. Does that mean if I just do full stack development I can automatically do AI or what's up? I'd like to know so I can choose the correct learning path. When it comes to learning path via bootcamp…”
Full stack developers do not know everything. They know how to build web applications from the front to the back end. All it means to be full stack is that you can go through the whole stack. Now AI itself, it is the future of course, but there is a lot to know about AI and you need to specialize. It's something I always tell people, I need to learn X so I can do Y. Why? What is the Y? You can't just learn AI. Why are you learning AI? What kind of AI? What are you trying to build? It's not just to get a job or to get a high paying job. You need to have a specific goal in mind of what kind… If you look at what kind of job that you want and what kind of applications that they build, then you can build a demo application for your portfolio and you can come up with that application is, that needs AI of some sort and then you'll know what you need to learn. Because AI is very broad. It's a very amorphous term. It applies to a lot of things.
There's machine learning, there's neural networks, okay? There's computer vision. That's technically in the AI umbrella. There's a lot of things. Artificial intelligence. There's AI for games, right? Gaming type of things. There's simulations, there's all kinds of stuff. What about self-driving cars, right? What about that kind of AI, right? What about drones and all that kind of stuff? Those are all kind of specialized Ais, right? That are going to be important. Robotics have a lot of AI into them. Those things kind of overlap. You need to not just say, I want to learn AI. Okay? But instead, pick a specific technology. Pick a specific application, be very, very specific and figure out what it is that you want to build. Maybe you want to build a robot that can navigate a room. Okay, that's a great reason to learn something, some AI that will accomplish that task, okay? Maybe you're going to use machine learning so that it's going to create a neural network in and map out the best way to solve a certain problem, or maybe you're going to make an AI program that's going to play chess, all right?
It might not be the best in the world, but what are you going to use to do that, right? What kind of technology, right? What kind of thing that you need to learn? Once you know what it is you're trying to do, then you can know what it is you're going to learn, and AI by itself is too broad. AI is a concept, it's not a technology. It's not specific enough and you can't learn enough about it, okay? You can have some general broad ideas you might take a course in school on AI, all right? But it's going to give you a broad definition. They're probably going to pick one specific thing and use that as AI to represent that, even though it's not going to be very applicable, it needs to be more and more specific.
What I would advise you to do is figure out, first of all, what kind of job do you want? So go and you could look at job search sites and you can see what kind of jobs there are. See what thing appeals to you the most. Write down some technologies, take a look at some of those technology. It could be things like AI for learning how to create self-driving cars, robotics, drones, computer facial recognition, computer vision type of stuff. Look and see what all those are. Decided which one that you want, make sure there's jobs there. And then I want you to pick a specific application that you're going to build. All right? What is the thing? It can be small, okay? It doesn't have to be big. Don't try to come up with this magnum opus kind of huge project. And I want you to figure that out and then figure out what you need to learn in order to do that. When you do it that way, it's going to be much better, okay? You're going to know what bootcamp or whatever that you need to enroll in.
You're going to know what courses to buy or what books to buy in order to be able to learn that thing, all right? And it's going to be very specific. It's that going to be so overwhelming. But you need to do the research. You need to figure this out. If you've got some tips for our friend here, leave them in the comments below. Let me know if you're in AI, what kind of AI? Let's see some specialties, some lists of things that you guys are doing. Give a thumbs up. If you like the video, make sure you click that subscribe button and I'll talk to you next time. Take care.