Future of Artificial Intelligence: Good or Bad?

Jane is a 2 years old girl. She has started learning how to speak, read, and write. Also, she has started learning about things around her. All the things she learns with the help of her friend Joe. As her parents are working professionals, she spends most of the time with Joe. Joe has been playing a big role in her development as a child. She plays with Joe, learns new things with Joe, and so on. But the main thing is, Joe is not a human. Actually, it is an AI robot. This situation seems a dream and unrealistic for many of us now, but considering the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), it is not so far when the same situation is going to be a concrete reality.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a branch of Computer Science that is concerned with building a machine that is smarter like a human, which can think and process information as a human does. The goal of AI is to create systems that can function intelligently and independently as like the human brain works. The easiest way to think about AI is in the context of humans after all humans are the most intelligent creature. The human brain is the most sophisticated thing in the universe which is responsible for the wonders of human civilization.

Artificial intelligence has already started increasing its efficiency and comfort in many details of everyday life which will have a more remarkable positive influence on human life and industry. Artificial intelligence is playing a role as the main driver of emerging technologies, for instance, big data, robotics, and IoT, and I think it will continue to act as a technological innovator for the expected future continuously.

Now if I want to make a shopping list, AI can help me to make it or do the work for me based on my preference and routines. If I feel lazy about getting up from bed to turn on and off the switch of the light, I can make it done by just giving a command to AI. These give us an insight that in near future AI is going to be an indispensable part of our all regular and common activities. AI will surely do many more complex tasks in the future. AI can make rational decisions on behalf of us and it also doesn’t get tiring. I think AI is going to make our daily tasks easier and faster by lessening our efforts to do small to big tasks.

Nowadays, we can also see that the application of AI is hugely used in the medical industry because of its powerful decision-making ability and accuracy in the prediction of disease capabilities in several cases. AI has a great impact on the field of medicines, researchers have developed several AI algorithms that predict a disease by screening X-rays images of patients. According to my analysis, AI is going to have a huge positive impact on our daily life as well as industrial sectors also.

At this point, a question may arise, if we keep us dependent on AI for everything, is it going to be harmful to us? Will AI take over humans as we have seen in sci-fi movies?

An amazing debate was held between Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, and Elon Musk, CEO of tesla about AI. Here is, some of their thoughts on this topic.

The biggest mistake I see people making is to assume they’re smart, AI will be much smarter than the smartest human you will ever know.

Elon Mask

Computers may be clever, but human beings are much smarter. We invented the computer — I’ve never seen the computer invent a human being.

Jack Ma

Though there are huge positive implications of AI in our daily life, there are some negative implications which cannot be overlooked. I think, the most important of which is the lack of personal privacy. As AI based machine is trained from the data we take from real-world, our personal information is continuously being used to train these AI systems. This leaves a big space for personal information leakage if the data are not properly managed and regulated by following certain laws and respecting individual privacy. AI is going to make some humans lazier. AI is making tasks easier and people need not think much to do tasks as AI is doing the complex parts on behalf of them. So, there remains a risk that people will be more dependent on AI and they won’t take the risk to think on their own intelligence in most general and regular purposes things. Also, the unemployment problem will increase in many countries because of the elimination of manual and traditional jobs’, replaced by automated AI based systems. But new kinds of jobs are going to be created certainly. Still, it may result in significant short-term job losses.

Like all times, some people, for sure will be going to use AI for bad purposes. So, there remains a chance of destroying humanity if something goes wrong or programmed badly by any unethical or criminal groups.

Although AI machines may have an impact on human life in increasing the efficiency of work. On the other hand, AI incurs high costs and efforts.

In my perspective, AI represents both great potential and risk. For the development and growth of human civilization, AI-based technology is an essential part now. AI is gaining momentum and hype day by day. Technology has become a part of our everyday life. According to many researchers, the future impact of AI is going to remain a burning question for the next few decades also. In the end, it largely depends on us, how we are going to control things and use the applications of AI.

Originally published at https://techlearners.xyz on November 13, 2020.