During the first half of the 20th century, the concept of artificial intelligence had a meaning almost exclusively reserved for science fiction fans. In literature and film, androids, sentient machines, and other forms of AI were at the center of many science fiction climaxes – from Metropolis has I robot. In the second half of the last century, scientists and technologists began to seriously strive to realize AI.
Brief history of the impact of AI on society
During the 1956 Dartmouth summer research project on artificial intelligence, co-host John McCarthy introduced the phrase artificial intelligence and helped incubate an organized community of AI researchers.
Often, the hype about AI exceeded the actual capabilities of whatever these researchers could create. But in the last moments of the 20th century, significant progress in AI began to shake society as a whole. When IBM’s Deep Blue defeated chess master Gary Kasparov, the game’s reigning champion, the event seemed to signal not only a historic and singular defeat in chess history — the first time a computer beat a top player — but also that a threshold had been crossed. Thinking machines have left the realm of science fiction and entered the real world.
The era of Big Data and the exponential growth of computing power, in accordance with Moore’s Law, then allowed AI to sift through gargantuan amounts of data and learn to accomplish tasks that were previously only accomplished by humans.
The effects of this machine renaissance have permeated society: voice recognition devices like Alexa, recommendation engines like those used by Netflix to suggest which movie you should watch next based on your viewing history and the modest steps taken by driverless cars and other autonomous vehicles are emblematic. But the next five years of AI development will likely bring major societal changes that go far beyond what we’ve seen so far.
What impact will AI have on the future?
Speed of life. The most obvious change that many people will feel in society is an acceleration in the pace of interactions with large institutions. Any organization that regularly engages with a large number of users (businesses, government units, non-profit organizations) will be obliged to implement AI in its decision-making processes and in its public and consumer activities. AI will enable these organizations to make most decisions much faster. As a result, we will all feel life speed up.
End of privacy. The company will also see its ethical commitments tested by powerful AI systems, especially in terms of privacy. AI systems will likely know each of us much better than we know ourselves. Our commitment to privacy has already been challenged by emerging technologies over the past 50 years. As the cost of scrutinizing our personal data drops and more powerful algorithms capable of evaluating massive amounts of data As it becomes more widespread, we will likely discover that it is more of a technological barrier than an ethical commitment that has led society to embrace privacy.
The human-AI partnership, or retaining humans in any process heavily influenced by artificial intelligence, will be essential to managing the fear of AI that permeates society.
The thicket of AI law. We can also expect that regulatory environment become much trickier for organizations using AI. Currently, across the planet, governments at all levels, from local to national to transnational, are seeking to regulate the deployment of AI. In the United States alone, we can expect a proliferation of AI laws as municipalities, states, and federal governments develop, implement, and begin to enforce new AI laws. And the European Union will almost certainly implement its long-awaited AI regulations over the next six to 12 economic quarters. The legal complexity of business will therefore increase considerably over the next five years.
Human-AI team. Much of society will expect business and government use AI as an augmentation of human intelligence and the expertise of, or partnering with, one or more humans working toward a goal, instead of using it to displace human workers. One of the effects of the idea born of artificial intelligence in century-old science fiction tales is that the tropes of the genre, foremost among them dramatic depictions of artificial intelligence as an existential threat to humans , are buried deep in our collective psyche. . The human-AI partnership, or retaining humans in any process heavily influenced by artificial intelligence, will be essential to managing the fear of AI that permeates society.
Which industries will AI have a big impact on?
The following sectors will be most affected by AI:
Education. At all levels of education, AI will likely be transformative. Students will receive educational content and training tailored to their specific needs. AI will also determine optimal educational strategies based on students’ individual learning styles. By 2028, the education system could be barely recognizable.
Health care. AI will likely become a standard tool for doctors and medical assistants tasked with diagnostic work. Society should expect the rate of accurate medical diagnoses to increase. But the sensitivity of patient data and the complexity of navigating the laws that protect it are also likely to lead to an even more complex forensic environment and increased operating costs.
Finance.Natural language processing combined with machine learning, it will enable banks and financial advisors as well as sophisticated chatbots to effectively interact with customers in a range of typical interactions: credit score monitoring, fraud detection, financial planning, questions insurance policy and customer service. AI systems will also be used to develop more complex and faster-executed investment strategies for large investors.
Law. We can expect to see the number of small and medium-sized businesses decline over the next five years, as small teams of one to three humans working with AI systems do the work that would have taken 10 to 20 lawyers in the past. faster and more cost-effectively. Given the good instructions, chatbots are already capable of providing rudimentary summaries of applicable laws and draft contract clause text. Based on the past few years of AI development and assuming it continues at a steady pace, by 2028 the number of human lawyers in the United States could be reduced by 25% or more.
Transportation. In the short term, we will see more autonomous vehicles for private and commercial use. From the cars many of us drive to work, to trucks hauling goods on the highway, to spaceships carrying humans and cargo to the Moon, autonomous vehicle transportation will likely lead the way the most dramatic of our arrival in the age of AI.
Examining the long-term dangers of AI
THE notion that AI poses an existential risk to humans has been around almost as long as the concept of AI itself. But over the past two years, as Generative AI has become a hot topic of discussion and public debate, the fear of AI has taken on new nuances.
Perhaps the most realistic form of this AI anxiety is the fear that human societies will lose control to AI-based systems. We can already see this happening intentionally in use cases such as algorithmic trading in the financial sector. The whole point of such implementations is to exploit the capabilities of synthetic minds operate at speeds that exceed the fastest human brains by orders of magnitude.
However, the existential threats posited by Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, and other AI pioneers seem like science fiction at best, and far less hopeful than much of the AI fiction created ago. is 100 years old.
The most likely current long-term risk of AI anxiety is missed opportunities. To the extent that organizations currently take these claims seriously and underinvest based on these fears, human societies will miss out on significant efficiency gains, potential innovations arising from human-AI association, and perhaps even new forms of technological and scientific innovation. knowledge production and other modes of societal innovation that powerful AI systems can indirectly catalyze.
Michael Bennett is Education Program Director and Responsible AI Business Lead at the Institute for Experiential Artificial Intelligence at Northeastern University in Boston. Previously, he served as director of experiential immersion learning programs for students at the Discovery Partners Institute at the University of Illinois. He holds a Juris Doctorate from Harvard Law School.
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