What are the risks and benefits of artificial intelligence?

by Sonali Mishra Human Resource Executive

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. These processes include learning (the acquisition of information and rules for using the information), reasoning (using rules to reach approximate or definite conclusions) and self-correction. Particular applications of AI include expert systems, speech recognition and machine vision.

Benefits of Artificial Intelligence:

AI machines use machine learning algorithms to mimic the cognitive abilities of human beings and solve a simple or complex problem.

Increase work efficiency

AI-powered machines are great at doing a particular repetitive task with amazing efficiency. The simple reason is that they remove human errors from their tasks to achieve accurate results every time they do that specific task.

Moreover, such machines can work 24X7, unlike humans. Thus, they eliminate the need to deploy two sets of employees working in day and night shifts to work on important tasks. For example, AI-powered chat assistants can answer customer queries and provide support to visitors every minute of the day and boost the sales of a company.

Work with high accuracy

Scientists are working to teach artificial intelligence powered machines to solve complex equations and perform critical tasks on their own so that the results obtained have higher accuracy as compared to their human counterparts.

Their high accuracy has made these machines indispensable to work in the medical field particularly, owing to the criticality of the tasks. Robots are getting better at diagnosing serious conditions in the human body and performing delicate surgeries to minimize the risk of human lives.

Reduce cost of training and operation

AI uses machine learning algorithms like Deep Learning and neural networks to learn new things like humans do. This way they eliminate the need to write new code every time we need them to learn new things.

There is significant Research and Development going on in the world to develop AI machines that optimize their machine learning abilities so that they learn much faster about new processes. This way the cost of training robots would become much lesser than that of humans. Moreover, machines already reduce the cost of operations with their high efficiency and accuracy of doing work. For example, machines don’t take breaks and can perform the same mundane task again and again without any downtime or change in results.

Improve Processes

The best part about AI-powered machines being deployed for work is that they let us gather humongous amounts of data related to their work. Such data can be processed to gather deep insights into the processes with quantitative analysis so that we can optimize them even further.

Machine learning abilities of AI machines are increasing further and further to do even the analysis by themselves.

Risks of Artificial Intelligence

Although hailed as a boon for humanity by tech pundits, Artificial Intelligence is feared by a lot of scientists and regular citizens alike. This fear has made it to the silver screen several times in the form of movies depicting dystopian futures created by AI machines that took over the planet. The most notable of these is the Matrix and the Terminator.

AI is Unsustainable

Intelligent machines have characteristically high computing powers contributed by an array of several processers. These computer chips have rare earth materials like Selenium as a major constituent. Besides, the batteries of such machines run on Lithium, again a rare element in earth’s crust. The increased mining of these materials is irreversibly damaging our environment at a rapid pace. Moreover, they consume huge amounts of power to function, that is putting severe pressure on our power plants and again harming the environment.

Lesser Jobs

There is no doubt that machines do routine and repeatable tasks much better than humans. Many businesses would prefer machines instead of humans to increase their profitability, thus reducing the jobs that are available for the human workforce.

A threat to Humanity(?)

Elon Musk is considered to be one of the smartest person working on AI in present times. He has also stated publicly that AI is the biggest threat to human civilization in the future. This means that the dystopian future that sci-fi movies show is not impossible. Also, Stephen Hawking has always shown his disagreement with the advancement in the field of AI.

The biggest risk associated with AI is that machines would gain sentience and turn against humans in case they go rogue.