September 03, 2018
Although it feels like we have been talking about artificial intelligence for years now, there is still a lot of hype around AI in the tech industry. Just when you think progress is slow you merely have to look at how experts in the field are harnessing the power of the AI, to see that globally advancements are moving at a pretty fast pace.
Just recently Facebook has improved how their AI tool translates languages using Neural Machine Translation (NMT). In Europe, The Max Planck institute for computer science in Germany has created a new AI system that uses two hundred eye movements to determine the personality of a person, and in Asia, project Green Horizon from IBM China uses AI to predict how pollution in the environment will increase within the time frame of seventy two hours. Last but not the least, a team from the University of Edinburgh and Institute of cancer research in London, have created an AI system that learns from the patterns of DNA mutations in Cancer cells to predict how they may evolve in the future.
All of this has happened in just the last few days, clearly showing that even though we are not much closer to AGI or Artificial General Intelligence, then we were a decade or so ago, the progress in NAI, or Narrow AI, is advancing at an exponential rate. With NAI, the process is as simple as training a Machine Learning system, much like the way we train our pets, in order to enable this type of AI to do repetitive mundane tasks without the need of human supervision.
Not only do such machines free up a lot of time for humans by taking up the overhead tasks, they also minimise the number of errors that usually occur due to human fallacies.
Furthermore, the progress in the corresponding technologies such as NLP or Natural Language Processing and deep learning shows that AI is continually becoming more effective in the tasks assigned to it, and often more effective than its human counterparts. The effect of this will be seen in future jobs as well, where AI will be able to do many of the tasks more efficiently than humans, rendering the latter replaceable. In fact, the growing effectiveness of AI on human unemployment is something that has authorities from varied spheres concerned about the future reliance on jobs!
AI and Human Unemployment
We have recently published a post on how the rapid progress in AI’s capabilities are creating a threatening environment for the employed people in varied sectors. As Andy Haldane, the chief economist at the Bank of England has said that AI may render people “technologically unemployed”
In a recent post on E-Content, David Skerrett sheds more light onto the topic. He wrote how it has become important for marketers especially to keep ahead of the time, and adapt with changing roles requirements. With powerful predictive tools available at one’s’ disposal, it makes no sense to manage the bidding and targeting of marketing campaigns, through manual optimization. So, he is not saying that there are no jobs for humans at all, rather the jobs in future would be more demanding, interesting and devoid of monotony. Already in the field of cybersecurity, there’s negative unemployment all across the world, where tasks that are way too complex to be taught to machines are waiting for talented individuals. So definitely, there will be a huge shift in the jobs for humans, but unemployment is not something that any genuinely talented and adaptable workforce has to worry about.
The bright side of progressive AI
The concerns with AI are not about how it can make humans replaceable, instead it is about how it makes humans more productive. One of the more interesting outcomes of predictive analytics in AI is its ability to personalize digital tools for humans. We will see in future that the personalization through AI won’t only be in mobile phones, as it will become useful in making tools more personalized according to the requirements of people, from different businesses and professions. In short, AI will make the same machine more personalized for specialised professions, making the professionals more efficient and productive in their tasks. We are already seeing the effects of search growth in the industry wherein researchers are actively using AI algorithms to make their data more optimised. So when we talk about the future of AI, we are not necessarily speaking about the future of mankind, as AI will not just remain as another piece of tech that we can come into contact with, rather AI has the potential to be a pervasive technology that will affect how we as a species may evolve.
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