Artificial Intelligence is the defining technology of the future. When we think of artificial intelligence, scenes of computers gone rogue and android killers come to our minds. This is because movies like “The Terminator” has established a sense of dread in our minds as the thought of AI going against the programming and turning up on humans. But the more intelligent AI becomes, the more we depend on it. The downsides and disadvantages of every new technology are often left unexplored. Humanity is facing the biggest question today that is how to control and mitigate its disastrous consequences. We will explore this question precisely today. Apart from that, we will also discover how AI can make our future better as well as terrifying.
Let us first look at the disastrous consequences that Artificial Intelligence brings with it.
Mass Unemployment
This is a common fear among analysts as well as workers today. Its because AI will soon result in mass global unemployment. This is because jobs are constantly becoming automated and human labor is no longer required. Job losses are the biggest worry. They are the primary reason for populism around the world. AI technology will soon lead to the creation of new and different kinds of jobs. The need for engineers will increase as the refinement of this technology will require the right talent to develop it. Although it is possible to reduce the damage to the labor market from AI with the help of upskilling and discovery of new jobs, it is clear that this issue of job losses won’t go away anytime soon.
War
The emergence of killer robots and several other uses of AI in military applications have experts worried that it may end up in war. Many analysts and campaigners claim that the use of AI in military decision making and the development of fatal autonomous weapons may lead to AI-enhanced wars. A bold prediction made is that there is a chance of a military AI system making a mistake in the analysis of a situation that can lead the countries to take potentially catastrophic decisions.
Robo doctors
Experts mostly believe that AI will provide a lot of benefits for medical practitioners, for instance, diagnosing illness very early and speeding up the health experience. But, doctors and experts also believe that it is heading in the direction of data-driven medical practices a bit too fast. One disadvantage of the application of AI in medical implications is that the privacy of patients and their data can be hacked anytime. Sometimes they even make incorrect and unsafe treatment recommendations to patients as the software is trained only to deal with a small number of cases and hypothetical situations rather than actual patient data.
Mass Surveillance
There is one more reason why experts fear AI. It’s because AI can also be used for mass surveillance. This fear is becoming a reality in China. It has 200 million surveillance cameras installed and it tracks the activities of its citizens. AI ranks them with scores that help them determine whether they can be prohibited from accessing everything such as plane flights to several dating services. It can bring a lot of security consequences.
Discrimination
AI has the potential to become prejudiced. We can understand this with an example. Microsoft created a chatbot named Tay. The bot was given a Twitter account. The users took less than a day to train it to post offensive tweets that supported white supremacy and Adolf Hitler. This happened because it was programmed to mimic users. Discrimination is one of the unexpected consequences that we can expect from technology. It can easily learn to spread sexual, racial, and other biases that the human race has spent 50+ years to remove. Experts say that AI can develop the ability to be in favor of a particular gender, sexuality, or race. For instance, facial recognition technology is better at judging white faces than black ones.
Now, let us have a look at the advantages that will make our future better in the coming days.
Lawyers and doctors in your pockets
Both virtual lawyers and virtual doctors are outperforming the real ones providing them legal information and correct diagnosis for illness quickly. After some time, there will be no need for specialists at all. Instead of that, we will always have our teacher, secretary, doctor, lawyer, and financial advisor in our pockets 24 hours a day. Moreover, scientists won’t have to sort, extract, and analyze through a large amount of published research. AI would always do it for them. Also, AI can read everything the human race has ever written and published with a basic reading comprehension skill.
Real-time models
Super intelligent artificial intelligence has a lot of global applications. It can collect data from surveillance cameras and satellites. Then, they can use this data to create a database of the whole world in real-time. With the help of this data, we can produce global system models like environmental changes and economic activities. These models help in designing effective interventions into the systems that help us to, for instance, reduce the effects of climate change. Moreover, it can start associating the races and genders with stereotypes. Researchers are finding a solution to reduce bias in AI-powered facial recognition systems.
Summary
Undoubtedly, in this article, we have gone through only a fraction of the foreseeable risks and advantages of AI. But of course, this does not mean that we should not seek the technology. There are innumerable possibilities for the future – both good and bad. But, if these super-intelligent machines from AI gain a mind of their own and can decide that we are replaceable, then it is completely on us.