This is an article I originally posted on Elixtacy on July 25th 2017. I have edited the original article.
Much has been said about artificial intelligence or AI. Often people have talked about AI in a very fearful way as something with catastrophic and apocalyptic consequences. Even highly regarded people like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawkings have warned of the potential dangers when AI becomes highly developed and sophisticated. There is no question that AI will develop exponentially and become an enormous industry. It will greatly augment other industries and increase their productivity in unprecedented ways.
What about when AI becomes more sophisticated than humans?
One of the hot topics surrounding AI and the main cause of most people’s concern is, what happens when AI becomes more sophisticated than humans? Most people view such a situation as a threat to humanity and there are perfectly legitimate and rational arguments as to how AI can be a real danger to the human race. But let’s look at AI and it’s potential in a more exciting and positive way. This is a technology, which has the power to change our lives and make our lives better and less gruelling. Already there exists different kinds of AI such as the electronic calculator, speech and image recognition, or the algorithms designed for automatic language translation, spelling and grammar corrections, and the ones tech goliaths Facebook, Google and Amazon use to create our daily news feeds and recommendations respectively etc. The Siri function on your Apple iPhone (or Amazon’s Alexa) is a very embryonic form of the ‘virtual assistant’ type of AI, which will grow and develop at an exponential rate. At some point in the future this kind of AI bot will be your 24/7 multi task virtual assistant, which you’ll be able to have intelligent two way conversations with about virtually (no pun intended!) anything. Based on all your digital data and spoken words, it will help you make all your decisions for you. This virtual assistant bot will help you with all kinds of issues whether they are legal and financial queries, relationship problems and generally try to help you to organise your life and make it more efficient and productive. A SMART Life! In some ways, it could be said that the future of the traditional Google Search engine, where you type what you are looking for, is ‘voice search’. Existing and continually developing search engine algorithms incorporating increasingly sophisticated speech recognition functions will develop into super smart virtual assistants where all quieries are answered and specific links and information to those quieries is provided through the already substantial amount of data and content on the net.
Job automation
People fear that AI will speed up the process of job automation and eventually make all jobs obsolete. This will happen yet it will happen to all Industrial Age, repetitive jobs with little to no creativity. Instead of being fearful, people should be happy. I mean do people enjoy repetitive, humdrum and uninspiring jobs? In our current culture there is this incomprehensible and irrational obsession with work; but work of an often soul destroying kind and not work that people enjoy and which can benefit and change society. AI will eventually automate all forms of repetitive and uncreative work and in the future people will be working far fewer hours.
A Post-Work society and why our creativity and ideas will be king
AI in the distant future will lead to a type of Post-Work society. Yet in these times people will be finally free from monotonous work and will likely be engaging and harnessing their creativity and ideas in doing something they love. Rather than being a threat, AI will be an indispensable and invaluable resource, which will augment, complement and greatly benefit our levels of creativity and ideas and help us to realise with the best results whatever we want to achieve. AI will greatly enhance our creativity and generation of ideas and help us to tap into them in unimaginable ways. And best of all, it will all most likely be free. No need to set aside money for expensive lawyers, financial advisors, planners and accountants. Or even software developers and digital data analysts and marketers. AI will be able to serve you in all these areas at no cost.
By Nicholas Peart
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