By now, you’ve likely encountered the pervasive debate: “AI is going to take our jobs and pose a threat to society!”
Let's try to simplify AI's core to decide who's the ‘Master’ in AI Vs. Humans!
Artificial Intelligence, commonly known as AI, has gained significant fame worldwide. Its growing popularity has garnered both supporters and critics. Let's understand it in depth to see what poses AI as a threat.
The mid-20th century emerged as the era of Information Technology brought to us a heap of information across the globe. It became quite a hassle to organize it and put it all at appropriate use. This gave rise to the demand of Automation and Robotics!
To achieve true organization, with everything sorted in a useful manner, requires the unique capabilities of the human brain. However, this tedious endeavor demands a significant amount of time, and even then, the inevitability of human error looms large. Enter the machine—a creation that simulates human intelligence—offering a potentially superior alternative to our imperfect efforts.
AI are machines that are programmed to think and learn like humans. The programming is what makes the AI so seamless and efficient. The idea behind AI is to apply principles of computer programming to exhibit the traits of the human mind such as learning and problem-solving.
The increased use of Artificial intelligence in various disciplines has become an industrial evolution of information technology. The different requirements demand different types of AI technology. On the basis of which AI technology can be broadly divided into two categories:
a.) Narrow AI: These AIs are used for narrowed down or specific tasks. They aren't required to use ‘general reasoning’ to complete their task. Therefore, they are also called Weak AI. These systems are typically trained for specific data sets or sets of rules to perform specific functions.
Examples of functions performed by Weak AI are,
Image Recognition
Natural Language Processing
Playing chess, etc.
Some of the Weak AI you must have used are,
Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and other such Virtual Assistants
Image Recognition systems in Google and other such apps
Chatbots
Recommendation systems
b.) General AI: These AIs are also known as Strong AI. They can outperform humans at nearly every cognitive task. This type of artificial intelligence can understand, learn and apply the results in broader tasks, instead of being confined to specific ones. Thus, they are programmed to have general reasoning, decision-making and problem solving ability to output human-like performance.
Some potential application of Strong AI includes:
Robotics and autonomous systems
Scientific Research and discovery
Medical diagnosis and treatment
Financial analysis and decision-making
Education and learning
The advantages of AI are manifold. It excels at automating repetitive tasks, offering efficiency and the ability to process vast amounts of data swiftly. AI promises to reduce errors and enhance accuracy. Beyond mere functionality, it holds immense potential for innovation, paving the way for new products and services. As AI technology continues to advance, it stands poised to significantly elevate the quality of our daily lives, easing the incessant demands of modern hustle.
However, as every coin has two sides and such is the case with AIs too!
With the fascinating advancements in AI come a host of ethical, moral, and psychological threats. On the surface, it seems marvelous and progressive to employ AI for our tasks, receiving desired outputs in mere seconds. Yet, we must consider the unsettling possibility of our information being tampered with. The use of AI brings significant privacy concerns and immense accountability. In a world where ethics and morals are increasingly compromised, the deployment of AI demands a renewed commitment to these principles.
The issue with AI can only be solved if the issues of humanity is solved!
It is important to understand that it's not the technology that is intelligent but the way we use it! Artificial will remain artificial. It can only camouflage itself as intelligence; however, real intelligence can never be deceived.
Therefore, AI may pose a lot of threats; job displacements, breach of privacy and surveillance, security risks, autonomous weapons, biases and discrimination, ethical concerns, dependence and reliability, existential crisis, superintelligence; but it can never take over Humans. The reason is simple and profound, humans have the capability of creating original ideas. The wiring and programming of the human brain is not something easy to replicated. AI and such technologies are proof of the power of Human mind.
AI is a tool that is designed by humans so, it is important to understand the originality of our own self rather than being intimidated by the artificially intelligent technologies.
AI should be treated as the author and video gamer enthusiast, Joanna Maciejewska suggests, “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do my art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”
