Artificial Intelligence (AI) is taking over the world by storm. As a result, it is important to have a clear understanding about the impact it can create on our lives. When you deep dive and look at AI, you will notice that it can create both positive and negative impacts on us. Continue to read and let’s learn more about it.
What is Artificial Intelligence all about?
AI is nothing but a computer application that can think on its own. It also has the ability to learn and process new information. In other words, you can consider it as an excellent simulation of human brain. As humans, we can effectively communicate and interact with AI. It allows us to reason, learn, and even understand different contexts.
You can divide AI into three main categories. They include:
- Weak AI – Weak AI focuses only on one task. We often encounter weak AI applications in our day-to-day lives. These applications have numerous limitations as well.
- Strong AI – Strong AI can learn and understand intellectual tasks. They are capable of mimicking human intelligence to a great extent.
- Super AI – Super AI can surpass human brain. In other words, they can perform tasks that humans can’t process with their brains.
What are the benefits of AI?
Now you have a basic idea of what AI is all about. With that in mind, let’s learn more about the pros and cons of AI. As the first thing, let’s explore all the advantages of AI.
It minimizes human error
One of the key benefits of AI is the ability to minimize human error. AI applications are taking decisions based on information provided to it. The algorithms will never get distracted, and they are precise with making calculations. As a result, you can easily overcome human errors, which often happen due to distractions. AI applications can still make errors, but correct programming helps you to reduce them up to a great extent.
Available 24×7
You can get AI to work 24×7. These computer applications never get tired. But humans are not capable of working for such long hours. In fact, an average human is productive only for around 3 to 4 hours per day. Unlike humans, AI doesn’t need to take breaks. As a result, you can get an AI program to continue working non-stop. They can also multi-task and deliver accurate results all the time. Due to the same reason, most companies out there are training Ais to handle tedious and repetitive jobs.
Makes unbiased decisions
The decisions we take as humans are driven by our emotions. However, AI programs don’t have emotions. They take decisions based on information available to them. As a result, you can expect AI to take unbiased decisions. This will eventually result in enhancing accuracy with decision making. The ability to make unbiased decisions make AI an ideal solution available for job application screening. It can effectively shortlist the best-fitting candidates for an open vacancy in a company.
Supporting innovations
Among advantages of AI, you can’t simply forget the support it gives for innovative applications. There are numerous applications that humans can’t resolve with their capabilities. That’s where AI comes into play. Self-driving cars are a great example to prove this fact. The advanced AI-based algorithms can get the most out of sensors and navigate cars on roads. They don’t require human intervention at all. Once self-driving cars become more popular, roads will become more efficient and safer. It will also benefit people with limited mobility.
Minimizing risks
The ability to minimize risks is also one of the key benefits of AI. For example, you can use AI to go to space, diffuse a bomb, or even explore the bottom of the ocean. No matter what, you can expect to perform the job with a higher level of accuracy. You can also expect AI to work responsibly. These applications will never wear out easily. Hence, you can think about using AI for applications where you don’t want any human to take unwanted risks.
Offering digital support
We can use properly trained AI applications to offer digital support as well. For example, we can see a large number of AI-powered chatbots on websites. Companies can use such AI-based applications for offering customer support. By doing that, they can get rid of the need to have human customer support specialists. They are highly efficient and accurate. As a result, no business should worry about the level of customer support they offer. In most instances, your customers will not be able to tell whether they are communicating with a human or an AI-powered chatbot.
What are the drawbacks of AI?
Now you are aware of the key benefits of AI. As the next part of our article on pros and cons of artificial intelligence, let’s explore the drawbacks.
Cost of using AI
When it comes to the disadvantages of AI, cost holds a prominent place. It is never an easy thing to create a computer program that can simulate human intelligence. The programmers and engineers who work on it have to spend a lot of time and resources. Even to run AI programs, it requires latest hardware and software. As a result, you can’t easily access AI-powered applications at a lower price tag. It requires a significant upfront investment.
Taking away jobs
As mentioned earlier, AI programs are better at performing tedious and repetitive jobs. As a result, there is a risk of AI displace occupations that humans have. This may result in higher levels of unemployment. For example, most businesses are now using AI.
As a result, humans who used to work at customer support centers have lost their jobs. In future, we can expect AI-powered self-driving taxis to hit the roads. This will make taxi drivers lose their jobs. It is important to keep this in mind before we face major issues with unemployment.
Lack of creativity
If you take a look behind the AI-algorithms, you see a bunch of logic. That’s the main reason why they are lacking human creativity. AI programs can learn things along with time, based on their previous experiences and provided data. However, they are not yet in a position to be creative on their own. It is true that AI-applications can mimic creativity, but when you compare them with human creativity, you will notice the difference.
Lack of emotions
Similar to lack of ethics, AI is lacking emotions as well. Humans are capable of working as a team. By working as a team, we can achieve common goals. However, AI-powered applications are not capable of doing this. When using AI for customer support, you can’t expect chatbots to make decisions based on emotions. This is one of the biggest challenges that companies have to face when they proceed with AI-powered applications.
Final Words
As you can see, AI offers both pros and cons. It is up to us to capitalize on the benefits of AI and harness them to ensure the betterment of humans. Along with that, we can start using AI for many different applications. They span across multiple domains such as education, marketing, healthcare, and many more. Since humans continuously research AI, we can expect it to be more advanced in future. This may allow AI to provide many more benefits in future.
