Welcome to the Age of Artificial Intelligence

AI is Shifting the Way We Interact with Technology. Here’s a High Level Crash Course on What That Means.

On August 6, 1991, the first website went live. It was relatively simple compared to today’s sites. While the Internet was already around in various forms, this was the start of the modern Internet. Today there are over a billion websites.

On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs revealed the first iPhone at Macworld. While smartphones were already around, this was the start of a smartphone proliferation. Today there are almost 7 billion smartphones.

Today, artificial intelligence is exploding in popularity and mainstream media. Much like the Internet and smartphones, we are in the midst of a leap in technology that will change our lives in several ways. With the capabilities, innovation, efficiency, and impact of artificial intelligence, it’s important to also recognize ethical concerns we learned from the previous advancements.

Here is a quick primer on artificial intelligence.

• Artificial intelligence is the ability of a machine or technology to imitate human intelligence and behavior. It is a broader term for things like machine learning, deep learning, predictive analysis, etc.
• Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence. It allows a system to automatically learn and improve from given datasets.
• Deep learning in a subset of machine learning. It uses complex algorithms and deep neural networks to train a model. A neural network is similar to a biological brain. There is an input layer, hidden layers, and an output layer all connected by a series of nodes.

Capabilities

Artificial intelligence is advancing to better replicate and enhance human cognitive abilities. Go, a strategy board game where two players try to surround more territory than their opponent, is simple to play but incredibly complex in strategy. AlphaGo is an artificial intelligent system that is the first to beat a human opponent and a world champion at Go. Being able to replicate and enhance the human ability to play the game, it is the strongest Go player in history.

While the capabilities for AI are both exciting and seemingly endless, bias and fairness is an ethical concern. AI systems can be trained on massive data sets that may have inherent biases. Whether the system is used to identify people or objects, predict behaviors, or even play a game, it is up to engineers developing AI’s capabilities to prioritize fairness and address biases in these algorithms.

Innovation

There are many industries that are seeing great leaps in innovation because of artificial intelligence. In healthcare, there is a new advancement called precision medicine. This is the ability to predict what treatments are likely to succeed based on a patient’s attributes analyzed by deep learning systems. This will assist human doctors in making better decisions for their patients through various therapies, medications, or other treatments.

Privacy and data security is an obvious concern. However engineers train these systems with datasets from patient data, it’s important to obfuscate identifiable data and adhere to security standards.

Efficiency

While there are understandable fears of artificial intelligence tools replacing jobs and changing workflows, many of these tools can increase efficiency leading to greater creativity and productivity. ChatGPT, a popular chatbot can generate text based on prompts and questions. Adobe Firefly and similar services can generate images based on text. Copilot from GitHub can even generate code. While these tools aren’t perfect, they can assist humans in their everyday jobs allowing them to focus on other tasks.

Impact

Artificial intelligence can have a massive impact on many issues humans face today, including Climate Change. Utilizing machine and deep learning systems, scientists and researchers are already connecting data sets for analysis. The results of these analyses assists both scientists and policy makers to make decisions to mitigate effects of the changing climate worldwide.

Accountability and transparency is a growing ethical concern when dealing with any decision making based on AI results. It will be up to the creators of these systems to add transparency to the algorithms so that researchers, scientists, and policy makers know how the results formed before making important decisions.

Conclusion

We are in the midst of a major shift in technology that will forever change the way we live. Just like the Internet and smartphone, Artificial Intelligence will shape how we learn, work, communicate, shop, and more. With AI’s endless capabilities, extraordinary efficiency, and worldwide impact, we’ll look back at the 2020s and try to remember a time before the age of artificial intelligence.