Month 2: Our World’s Issues: How AI Can Fix Them - (Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure)

My Account

Month 2: Our World's Issues: How AI Can Fix Them - (Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure)

My Account-

I found myself in awe of human ability the other day whilst reading an article about the creation of Artificial Intelligence. How can we be built with such complexity yet go about our lives without everyone truly recognizing and praising our abilities? We have sculpted a tool so universal that every single human will utilize it in the future. We also have opened up a whole new world of possibilities that can break down walls of hate, efficiently save lives and even look beyond humanly possible into our solar system to find answers to save mankind and Earth. 

In my last year of middle school, I joined the CEESA Robotics team as a quick impulse decision. Honestly, I had absolutely no idea about what I was getting myself into. My immediate bias towards robotics was thinking it was about building legos and playing some game with them. I was the announcer at the tournament the year before for the opening ceremony, so I had some idea about what it looked like, but I was so oblivious to this new realm of problem-solving. I stepped foot into the robotics club feeling pretty clueless with a confident grin painted on my outward appearance. I quickly discovered the pure essence of this club--everyone supported one another. Unfortunately, the next week the COVID-19 cases were rapidly escalating; to what would soon become the peak of the 3rd wave. I stayed home because of it, and that is when robotics shifted my mindset. At this moment, I was on zoom for this club; sprawled out on my living room floor were robot pieces, chargers, motors, USB's and adapters, and one confused girl, trying to get my instructor's attention. I would repeat his name over and over. He was in a room full of students while I may as well have been isolated on a new planet trying to communicate, build and program a robot. I got through that period with a fully built robot and parts of code to maneuver it into different actions. 

As the COVID numbers dropped, I returned to campus. My eagerness to compete was rising as our instructors told us that we would hold the CEESA school's robotics tournament virtually. My teammate and I were to code our robot to solve as many of the challenges on the game table as possible in the time given. On the tournament day, my chest tightened while my mind expanded. What I loved about this narrowed-down version of Artificial Intelligence and engineering was the sheer hands-on problem solving and trial and error that had to happen for the outcome of the robot to shine without any help from the creators. You have to trust that everything you put into the robot will flourish as an output. Learning first-hand in one of the most basic forms of this field has forever changed me. I know now the possibilities of our abilities and how we can exert that into machines. I also understand that for something to work (flourish), you have to go through trial and error so many times until it feels exhausting. Nothing that looks easy on the outside had easy work behind the scenes. 

While only being in middle school, I was able to start solving practical problems with AI. That shows that the work being done in these real-world engineering and computer science fields are beyond imaginable. We only see the outputs of these projects, never the inputted consistency, strategy, and drive. We are slowly enabling AI to reach out its hand to us and ask if it can help us along this steep mountain. I feel fortunate that I was able to get a taste of this reality at an early age and hope that others can receive the same opportunities.