Schooling a Machine

In our day to day life we face many tasks whether they are expected or unforeseen. Unsurprisingly, when we face unforeseen challenges we are more prone to struggles and failure, but when it comes to tasks we were ready for, usually we are well more equipped to complete them with flying colors. Although familiar tasks are easier for us to complete, as we continue to see unfamiliar tasks more and more, we will our struggles to complete will decrease over time.

In other words, we are conditioned to learn from our experiences. Since childhood, we have learned to walk, talk, eat, and dress up among man other actions, but rarely did we ever pay attention to the process of mastering these simple but vital tasks. Once we entered school, we began facing new challenges everyday from class activities and home work to assessments and team projects. All these actions were facilitated by teachers to help us achieve our end goal of acing final exams at the end of the year. Even though our very first final exam was an unfamiliar concept to us, all the knowledge we accumulated throughout the year prepared us, and future exams became less foreign and gradually expected over time.

The purpose of learning and training the human body is to perform better and attain the most desirable results possible. So this gives rise to the question do machines also need to be trained to perform tasks? The easy answer is yes, but the process of training machine models before using them to predict future outcomes is anything but. This is because data scientists have to assume the role…