Artificial Intelligence is creating waves as the world gets digitized, processes get automated in the face of rising global population, concerns about environment and managing resources and livelihoods across the world. World population has just crossed 8 billion and stands at 8.1 billion, looking to reach 10.3 billion by 2100. Many of the problems with that growth can be fixed with technology.
Technology has put the world in the palm of one’s hands. AI
is a great innovation with amazing features and potential to really impact the
world, positively. It can impact human lives and livelihoods, across
manufacturing, medical sciences, construction, energy, environment and so much
more. It’s a fantastic tool when used with conscience and intelligence; a
dangerous weapon if not used properly.
BACKGROUND
AI or Artificial Intelligence has a long history, unknown to
many who see this as a relatively modern phenomenon. The field of AI research
was founded during a summer conference at Dartmouth College in the mid-1950s,
where John McCarthy, computer, and cognitive scientist, coined the term
“artificial intelligence. Marvin Minsky (Carnegie-Mellon University) defines AI
as "the construction of computer programs that engage in tasks that are
currently more satisfactorily performed by human beings because they require
high-level mental processes such as: perceptual learning, memory organization
and critical reasoning”.
Why has AI taken off now?
Artificial Intelligence has started disrupting a wide
variety of domains. There are a few reasons AI is taking off now.
·
Availability & Access to Data: Data is
constantly being shared by users and applications in public and private
domains. Previously, customers and businesses were skeptical about sharing data
and often held onto the data for fear of leaking information. Now, data is
being shared continuously, knowingly, and mostly, unknowingly e.g., location,
your preferences, topics you are interested in, items you like to buy, and activities
you are doing and interested in. And, all this data is available in a digital
format, ripe for computers and machines to consume. Some of the information is
available in textual or pictorial form and may need significant processing to
extract actionable data.
·
Data storage: With the advent of new technology
and cloud infrastructure, data storage has become cheap and capacity almost
limitless. Huge sets of data are now stored and readily available in structured
or unstructured form.
·
Computational ability: Processing power to gather,
clean, analyze, and perform computation of the data has increased
exponentially. Big data sets are processed, analyzed, trained, and inferred
from easily, much quicker than earlier. Issues around consumption of data and
processing them efficiently and quickly do exist and more research is being
done.
·
Sophisticated algorithms: With decades of
research, algorithms have become smarter and mature. Advancements in Data
Sciences, Machine Learning, Heuristics, neural networks, and recently Quantum Computing,
has made processing and derivation of results much faster and more relevant.
Artificial Intelligence – it’s wide range of uses
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a wide range of
applications across various fields. Here are ten of its top uses:
·
Healthcare: AI is used for medical image
analysis, disease diagnosis, personalized treatment plans, drug discovery, and
patient management, improving accuracy and efficiency in healthcare delivery.
·
Finance: AI is employed for algorithmic
trading, fraud detection, credit risk assessment, customer service through chatbots,
portfolio management, enhancing decision-making and risk management in the
financial sector.
·
Autonomous Vehicles: AI powers
self-driving cars, enabling them to navigate, detect obstacles, and make real-time
decisions, potentially revolutionizing transportation and reducing accidents.
·
Natural Language Processing (NLP): NLP
techniques are used in chatbots, virtual assistants, language translation,
sentiment analysis, content generation, and more, facilitating human-computer
communication and language-related tasks.
·
E-commerce and Marketing: AI aids in
personalized product recommendations, customer segmentation, demand
forecasting, and targeted advertising, leading to improved customer experiences
and better marketing strategies.
·
Manufacturing and Industry: AI-driven
robotics, automation, predictive maintenance, and quality control optimize
manufacturing processes, leading to increased efficiency, reduced downtime, and
enhanced product quality.
·
Education: AI can significantly impact
the education domain by becoming the ideal personal tutor and having a
significant influence on average kids. It will figure out the gaps, focus on
addressing them and customizing instructions for the student.
·
Entertainment: AI is employed in video
game development, content recommendation systems for streaming platforms, music
composition, and special effects, enhancing entertainment experiences.
·
Cybersecurity: AI helps in detecting and
responding to cyber threats by analyzing patterns, identifying anomalies, and
predicting potential attacks, bolstering the security of digital systems and
networks.
·
Agriculture: AI assists in crop
monitoring, disease detection, yield prediction, and precision farming,
optimizing resource utilization and increasing agricultural productivity.
·
Energy Management: AI is used in
optimizing energy consumption, grid management, predictive maintenance of
energy infrastructure, and renewable energy generation, contributing to more
sustainable and efficient energy systems.
·
Computer Programming: Just by describing
in plain English the purpose of the program, tools like CoPilot can quickly
generate standard code in any programming language and thereby free up the
programmer from writing run-of-the-mill programs and enable them to develop
more complex and niche programs.
These are just a few examples, and the applications of AI
continue to expand across various industries as the technology evolves.
Human involvement as AI grows.
As Artificial Intelligence impacts every digital interaction
of our lives and livelihoods, humans will play a critical role on many fronts.
It is essential to understand that AI still needs the expertise of humans to
finally pull the trigger. Even though things are going digital, and data
driven, the decisions being made are for you or on your behalf, so they
continue to be guard railed by the norms in that industry or society or professions.
·
Expertise – AI is based on inference engines and
knowledge bases. Human expertise in defining the necessary and sufficient rules
and constraints, developed empirically and intuitively by experts over decades forms
the foundation of the inference engine, and decision making.
·
Efficiency - Technology will automate, remove
the boring, painful manual jobs.AI will help humans to focus on more
value-added fulfilling jobs, which leverage the higher skillset, more
challenging and satisfying. Mundane work takes up unnecessary time; humans can
deliver much more value focusing on high-skilled “brainier” work.
·
Involvement – Human involvement, learning from
actions taken, helping with decision making are key to the success of AI. These
are jobs which often lead to manual errors, which lead to more effort in
reconciliation and fixing the errors.
o
Many of the uses highlighted above help
businesses and people in processing humongous amount of data, run many complex
models, weed out scenarios and help in decision making and taking the right
action.
o
AI will help humans to do things like review
results or scans and diagnose diseases or potential problems in the future.
Diagnosis which would have been difficult for doctors based on just his
knowledge, can be possible as computers leverage AI, much larger datasets, and
rules.
o
Key is they use human’s expertise and knowledge
to do things which was impossible for humans to do efficiently and then,
deliver the results for humans to act on.
·
Bias – It’s critical to train AI models to eliminate
obvious biases tied to individuals. Biases that exist in current algorithms and
models can be better deciphered and rectified by a wider group involvement and
continuous reviews of processes.
·
Validation – Humans are needed to validate the data
and ensure the integrity of the data. They need to validate the models and the
results and determine them to be suitable for action.
·
Decision making – AI will be a great tool to
augment human decision-making. For example, an expert geoscientist, looking at
100 spreadsheets to decide on which field to explore, can now rely on AI and
automation to process a million data sources, run complex models, and give the
top 5 scenarios to consider. Humans still make the final decision, but it is
based on many more data sets, scenarios, models, and complexities. AI will not
make the final decision; humans will in many cases. For this balance to work,
it is critical to know where AI is used and how any potential bias can be
addressed.
·
Ethics and Empathy – One of the biggest concerns
is AI going berserk without any human intervention, no consideration for human
empathy, softer side of jobs, services, and interaction. Already significant
investment is happening to put humans as arbitrators and, to research and model
human features into AI models. AI cannot be an uncontrolled Frankenstein; it
should be a better version of what humans could do alone but now can be
achieved by working with humans. Humans can apply these softer skills,
subjectively judge between options, and make the best use of AI. There should
be a strong governance angle to this – where AI and its applications need to be
monitored and proper oversight needs to be provided, like Asimov’s law of
robots or Microsoft’s AI standards.
·
Augmented Intelligence – Finally, the
combination of human and artificial intelligence created “Augmented
Intelligence”. They close each other’s gaps; while AI processes more data, more
models, and performs tasks automatically that humans cannot; human intelligence
brings in empathy, subjectivity, validation, and many of the subjective mental
inferences, machines may not be capable of.
Conclusion
Human intervention and natural intelligence must work
together with Artificial Intelligence to bring the biggest value to humanity.
Machines cannot be left to their uncontrolled will; humanity, empathy, and governance
should be in place to monitor, control and pick the right uses of AI. That will
impact the world, positively and for the greater good of humanity.
