Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer a futuristic notion of robot armies taking over the world, it has become embedded within the technology we interact with every day. Whether it is opening your ’phone with face recognition, asking Alexa the temperature outside or checking your latest Spotify recommendations, AI is accelerating our ability to consume information and operate technology more efficiently.
Although it may feel like AI has sneaked up on us over the last few years, it has been around since 1956, when the first AI program was presented by John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky at a Dartmouth College conference. Since then, the progress of AI has been somewhat of a rollercoaster.
AI is accelerating our ability to consume information and operate technology more efficiently
Data scientists would develop AI capability until they reached the limit of computing power and then development stopped, until the next advancement in computer storage and processing speed was made.
‘It seems AI has only recently been leveraged in motorsport and engineering, but actually the toolboxes in software such as Matlab use a Gaussian process, which is a machine learning modelling technique, and they have been around since the turn of the century,’ says Gary Brotman, CEO at Secondmind, a company using AI to streamline testing programmes for motorsport and automotive manufacturers.
‘The only difference is AI is now more operational and used at scales only possible due to cheaper, accessible computing power.
‘Artificial intelligence sounds like science fiction, but ultimately it is just maths’
Gary Brotman, CEO at Secondmind
‘The algorithms and big data have been sitting and waiting, and now that computing capability has improved, the opportunity for AI in motorsport has exploded,’ continues Brotman. ‘Artificial intelligence sounds like science fiction, but ultimately it is just maths. There are different problems that require different mathematical
