Artificial intelligence raises excitement and fear in the minds of workers everywhere
By Kelly Stellmacher
Columbia University is working on software that is programmed into a drone and tasked to do surveillance of corn crops.
The machine was taught through machine learning how to identify diseases that are dangerous to corn crops. The intent is for the drone to monitor the crops, looking for diseases, and spraying plants with infections so that they don’t spread.
Hod Lipson, an engineer at Columbia, explains that before drones were manufactured to detect these diseases, people would need to spray entire crops in order to kill diseases. It was both time consuming and very inefficient. With the drones though, singular plants can be sprayed and the rest of the field still grows infection free.
“Robotics and AI can worm their way into almost anything… Everything is affected,” he said.
Artificial intelligence will transform jobs of all shapes and sizes in the coming decades as intelligent devices become more common. There are a few systems in use today which qualify as partial machine intelligence, but nothing in the world today is even close to mastering the capabilities of a human brain.
“Machine intelligence is still pretty dumb, most of the time,” said Phil Wainewright in the article Why humans will always be smarter than artificial intelligence.
AI is, in short, a system that is capable of performing tasks and learning new information on its own. This method is called “machine learning.” One system, which is capable of this, is facial recognition and generation software. Developers use what is known as a neural network to teach a computer what a face looks like.
The computer is given pictures of faces and analyzes enough to be able to recognize a face from a picture it has never seen. This type of learning program is also used in audio generation and speech recognition.
Whether people like it or not, AI will play a large role in the future.
“In America alone, for example, the report suggests that 13 million jobs will be destroyed because of automation,” said The Verge’s James Vincent.
There are many people who fear that the rise of AI will place multitudes of people without a job and in a sense, they are not wrong.
There are many possible repercussions of the implementation of AI in the workforce, and the loss of human employees’ jobs in one of them. If and when cars that can drive on their own are a commonality, many many taxi drivers, shipping drivers, food deliverers, and chauffeurs will all be out of a job.
Even journalism may be affected by artificial intelligence. The AP’s A guide for newsrooms in the age of smart machines explains how AI could take over analyzing data for a story or develop alternate points of view to the reporter.
“While no system is perfect, AI can nonetheless provide an additional perspective to a traditional news story, and as AI technologies continue to improve, the possible perspectives we can apply to stories will increase,” the authors write.
Despite some of the possible drawbacks of AI, many jobs will also be created. For example, many people who are experienced in the field of programming will be needed in order to code the software for the machines.
Another positive outcome is the capability for people to work over long distances. People are needed to gather and process the data in order to teach the programs through machine learning. The website “Hackernoon” says that because of the internet and efficient communications, people are able to work in rural areas, such as in many developing countries around the world.
People living in less-developed areas would be able to work well-paying jobs and never need to travel anywhere. This would improve the economy of the countries they live in and also their personal families’ finances.
There are also many jobs that can benefit from AI without eliminating the human aspect altogether. If artificial intelligence were to be implemented in hospitals as a diagnostic analyzer of patients, the doctor would be able to gain a second opinion on which to base his or her own.
An example of a use for machine assistance is formulating a trailer for a movie. IBM was tasked to create a program, which can create a trailer for the thriller-horror movie Morgan. The company taught the program to make it by showing it many trailers of movies fitting the genre.
AI Tech manager at IBM John Smith said that he computer reasoned the trailers of horror-thrillers contained mainly three varieties of scenes: scary scenes, suspenseful scenes, and tender scenes.
The computer took these criteria and created a trailer for the movie. This could save the months of time needed to create a preview for a movie and therefore give the creators more time to improve the movie itself.
“Faced with a constant onslaught of data, we needed a new type of system that learns and adapts, and we now have that with AI,” said Arvind Krishna, Senior Vice President of Hybrid Cloud and Director of IBM Research. “What was deemed impossible a few years ago is not only becoming possible, it’s very quickly becoming necessary and expected.”
