In the first half of the twentieth century, the concept of artificial intelligence had almost exclusive meaning to science fiction fans. In literature and film, robots, sentient machines, and other forms of artificial intelligence have been at the center of many high science fiction genres – from Metropolis to I am a robot. In the second half of the last century, scientists and technologists began a serious attempt to achieve artificial intelligence.
A brief history of the impact of artificial intelligence on society
At 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 artificial intelligence researchers.
Often, the hype around AI has outpaced the actual capabilities of anything these researchers can create. But in the final moments of the twentieth century, major advances in artificial intelligence began to shake society as a whole. When IBM's Deep Blue defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, the game's champion, the event seemed to mark not only a historic and unique defeat in the history of chess – the first time a computer had beaten a grandmaster – but also that threshold. has been exceeded. Thinking machines have left the world of science fiction and entered the real world.
The era of big data and the exponential growth of computational power according to Moore's Law has enabled artificial intelligence to sift through vast amounts of data and learn how to accomplish tasks that previously could only be accomplished by humans.
The effects of this machine renaissance have permeated society: voice recognition devices like Alexa, recommendation engines like the one Netflix uses to suggest which movie you should watch next based on your viewing history, and the modest steps taken by self-driving cars and other self-driving vehicles. It is symbolic. But the next five years of AI development are likely to lead to major societal changes far beyond what we have seen so far.
How will artificial intelligence affect the future?
Speed of life. The most obvious change that will be felt by many people across society is the increased frequency of dealing with large institutions. Any organization that regularly deals with large numbers of users – businesses, government units, and non-profit organizations – will have to apply AI to its decision-making processes and to its public- and consumer-facing activities. AI will allow these organizations to make most decisions more quickly. As a result, we will all feel that life is accelerating.
The end of privacy. Society will also see its ethical obligations tested by powerful AI systems, especially privacy. AI systems will likely become better at knowing each of us than we know ourselves. Our commitment to protecting privacy has already been severely tested by emerging technologies over the past 50 years. As the cost of deeply examining our personal data declines and more powerful algorithms capable of evaluating vast amounts of data become more widespread, we will likely find that it is a technological barrier rather than a moral obligation that has driven society's enshrinement of privacy.
Human-AI collaboration, or keeping humans in any process significantly affected by AI, will be key to managing the resulting fear of AI that permeates society.
Artificial intelligence law forest. We can also expect the regulatory environment to become more complex for organizations using AI. Nowadays, around the world, 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 wealth of AI laws as city, state, and federal government units draft, implement, and begin enforcing new AI laws. The EU will almost certainly implement its long-awaited regulation on AI within the next six to twelve business quarters. As a result, the legal complexity of doing business will grow significantly in the next five years.
Teamwork between humans and artificial intelligence. Much of society expects businesses and government to use AI to enhance human intelligence and expertise, or as a partner to one or more humans working to achieve a goal, rather than using it to displace human workers. One effect of AI being born as an idea in century-old science fiction tales is that the tropes of the genre, most importantly the dramatic portrayal of AI as an existential threat to humans, are buried deep in our collective psyche. . Human-AI collaboration, or keeping humans in any process significantly affected by AI, will be key to managing the resulting fear of AI that permeates society.
What industries will AI have a major impact on?
The following industries are most affected by artificial intelligence:
education. At all levels of education, AI is likely to be transformative. Students will receive educational content and exercises tailored to their specific needs. AI will also determine optimal educational strategies based on students' individual learning styles. By 2028, the education system may be unrecognizable.
health care. AI is likely to become a standard tool for doctors and physician assistants tasked with diagnostic work. Society should expect an increased rate of accurate medical diagnosis. But the sensitivity of patient data and the complexity of navigating the laws that protect them are also likely to lead to a more complex medico-legal environment and increased costs of doing business.
finance. Natural language processing combined with machine learning will allow banks and financial advisors as well as sophisticated chatbots to efficiently interact with customers across a range of typical interactions: credit score monitoring, fraud detection, financial planning, insurance policy matters and customer service. Artificial intelligence systems will also be used to develop more complex and faster-executing investment strategies for large investors.
Law. We can expect the number of SMEs to decline over the next five years, as small teams of one to three people working with AI systems take on and do work that would have required 10 to 20 lawyers in the past. Faster and more cost effective. Given the appropriate prompts, chatbots are already able to provide preliminary summaries of applicable laws and draft the language of contract terms. Based on the past few years of AI development and assuming it continues apace, by 2028 the number of human lawyers in the United States could decline by 25% or more.
communications. The near future will see more autonomous vehicles for private and commercial use. From the cars many of us drive to work, to the trucks carrying goods along the highway, to the spacecraft transporting humans and cargo to the moon, autonomous vehicle transportation is perhaps the most dramatic example of our arrival in our time. Amnesty International.
Study the long-term risks of artificial intelligence
The idea that AI poses an existential threat to humans has been around almost as long as the concept of AI itself. But in the past couple of years, as generative AI has become a hot topic of public discussion and debate, fear of AI has taken on a newer character.
Arguably the most realistic form of this AI anxiety is the fear that human societies will lose control over the systems that support AI. We can already see this happening voluntarily in use cases like algorithmic trading in the finance industry. The primary goal of such applications is to exploit the ability of artificial brains to operate at speeds several orders of magnitude faster than the fastest human brains.
However, the existential threats posed by Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton and other AI pioneers sound at best like science fiction, and far less optimistic than much of the AI fantasy created 100 years ago.
The most likely long-term risk to worry about from AI today is missed opportunities. To the extent that organizations at this moment may take these claims seriously and reduce investment based on those concerns, human societies will miss out on significant gains in efficiency, potential innovations that flow from the human AI team, and perhaps even new forms of technological and scientific innovation. Knowledge production and other societal innovations that powerful AI systems can indirectly stimulate.
Michael Bennett is the Director of Curriculum and Business Leader for Responsible Artificial Intelligence at the Institute for Experimental Artificial Intelligence at Northeastern University in Boston. Previously, he served as Director of Student Experiential Immersion Learning Programs at the Discovery Partners Institute at the University of Illinois. He holds a Juris Doctorate from Harvard Law School.
