Computer programing is the art and science of writing very precise instructions to tell a computer what you want it to do for you. And it turns out that when you write good instructions, computers could do a lot. I was recently on an airplane, and the person sitting next to me told me their career story. She used to have a job as an executive assistant. And she told me that she learned to code and wrote a program to monitor her executive's calendar, so that if you know her boss did something funny with his calendar, she'd get a notification so that she could go fix it. So, here's someone that had learned to code, then wrote a little bit of code that actually helped her do her job more efficiently. I think in almost all walks of life, learning to code., getting computers to do what you want will help you get a lot more done. Programing more broadly has helped advance humanity in so many ways. All of them driven by people who are writing code. The Hubble Space Telescope images that have helped us unravel the mysteries of the universe are processed and analyzed using computer programs written by scientists. The particle accelerators that discovered the Higgs boson were only made possible because developers wrote software to analyze the data they collected in order to drive forward our understanding of physics. Our daily use of the Internet too was made possible only through people writing computer programs. When you pick up your phone and send a message to someone else. Well, you're using a computer program that someone else wrote. If you use GPS to navigate or if you or someone you love uses assistive technology like speech recognition or eye tracking. These are technologies that have changed the lives of so many people with a disability. All of these are programs that someone wrote. At the heart of computer programming is gaining the skill to command machines to do your bidding. Computer programs are sets of precise instructions that tell a computer how to perform a task. Just as a cooking recipe guides you through the steps needed to consistently achieve a delicious result. A computer program provides instructions for a computer to perform a specific task. Being able to program will give you an edge in terms of what you'll be able to accomplish. I see many people using programming to automate repetitive tasks like repeatedly taking, say, PDF documents and extracting relevant data into spreadsheets. And beyond analyzing data that you or your company may already have, programming also helps you gain brand new insights. I see many teams, including business analysts, for example, increasingly using AI tools like ChatGPT to automatically browse the web, download a bunch of web pages, and synthesize a report to help them gain market insight to learn more about what's happening in some part of the world. And as you learn to code, you'll better identify and automate more and more of these types of tasks using AI yourself. And it turns out that through programming, you can tell your computer to use AI tools like ChatGPT or other AI language models. By writing just a few lines of code, not you, but your computer, can now also go use ChatGPT to help it carry out tasks. The core part of writing code in this course would be to get your computer to use AI tools via Python, so that it could do more for you. Most AI developers like me use Python pretty much all the time. And it turns out Python is actually the most popular programming language. Python has a very supportive community of developers. If you have a question, there's so many Python developers around the world. So you can often get someone to help you out or find someone that had the same question. And it turns out that chatbots like ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini, also know Python pretty well, and so they can help you out if you get stuck on the problem. So, when you're programming, and you have a question, I encourage you to try asking a chatbot to help you find a solution as I'll show you in this course. Today, Python is powering tons of AI applications. Python code is running in many self-driving cars. Is using software that powers chatbots and in many other AI applications, from smart agriculture to healthcare to financial services, and on and on and on. And, the use of Python extends well beyond that. Many websites, smartphone applications, video games and more, are run using Python. So, when you learn Python, you'll be learning one of the most important tools in programming. No matter what your goals are. So, I hope that this course, AI Python for Beginners will be just your first step. That will set you up to keep on taking more and more and more steps, and doing more and more with Python and with programming in general. So you too can help advance humanity through code. So with that, let's go on to the next video. We'll start to take a look at how chatbots interact with Python.
AI Python for Beginners: Basics of AI Python Coding