AI Boon Or Bane

This is one of the most debatable questions around the corner. To understand and answer it, we need to understand what AI is and it’s applications in our day-to-day life. In the end, I hope you will able to answer it more efficiently what you think about this & I will let you know my thoughts too. I will try not to get technical and keep it in simple laymen’s terms.

What is AI?

According to Wikipedia, Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, unlike the natural intelligence displayed by humans and animals, which involves consciousness and emotionality. In simple words, it is an intelligence created artificially by humans to reduce human efforts by taking the decisions which prior needed humans intelligence.

But wait…there’s more

As we know, machines are more efficient in performing tasks than humans. So making machines smarter and more intelligent will ease the lifestyle of humans. We will see this by taking several applications. These will explain how things used to work before & after the implementation of AI. And we will also see how smart machines reduced more human effort than traditional machines. We will take one application & take a deep dive into it. How machines help us in performing our day-to-day actions more conveniently. And how adding AI to that makes it even more convenient.

Automobiles, back in the early 1800s we used to ride horses, bullock carts and other sorts of animals for transportation. There were a lot of challenges like feeding the animals , slow speed, need larger space to make stables for that animal & many more.

But when car came into existence it changed the whole idea. Now we could travel a long distance in a very short amount of time. It didn’t require much space to park etc.

But there was still one common challenge in cars and animal-based transport system. That is, they both require a person to guide them, also commonly called drivers to drive them.

This challenge overcame recently when we made cars smarter than ever. Now autonomous cars are the new thing, Vision AI made it possible that we do not require a driver to drive it. Google Waymo, Tesla, etc are the examples which provide autonomous driving vehicles.

More AI applications in our day-to-day life

1. Infinite scrolling:- Social media platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram have more than 1 billion active users on their platform. And one crucial feature that keeps users engaged with these platforms is infinite scrolling in the feed. Before AI came to play people saw limited content in their social platform feed that too posted by their friends. But when UX more simple and AI came into play, no matter how much you scroll down you will get a post to see. Generally, these post appears based on the AI algorithms set at the backend which based on numerous metrics such as what do you like, what your friends like, what was your recent activity, what type of content you take time to see, etc. And the posts go on and on.
2. Facial Recognition:- Remember how we used to unlock our devices by setting pin and remembering them. These were made more efficient when the touchscreen phone came into the market. They allowed us to set patterns instead of pins. It made our life easier. But when AI came, FR in which we do not require to remember anything at all. Facial recognition or FR is now available on most mobile devices. It is being used as a security purpose to unlock our devices. But wait, there was one more use that we saw but did not know was similar to FR, i.e auto-tagging in Facebook group pictures. Remember how we used to tag our friends one by one on Facebook. But suddenly one day Facebook automatically started tagging almost all our friends reducing our effort. All this is again achieved due to a huge amount of data and the help of AI.
3. Recommendations:- Remember when we used to walk into a superstore there were some items like chocolates, candies which are set up at the counter. These were just generics products that most people love and tend to buy at the last minute while checking out. But when shopping became digital this s*** got more real. Now we get a recommendation on every product we see. Based on a report by Mckinsey around 35% of Amazon.com’s revenue is generated by its recommendation engine. Even OTT platforms like Netflix, Prime Video, Hotstar has a separate section for the recommendation. And these recommendations get better over time as they collect more and more of the personal data. All this is also achieved through AI.
4. Voice Assistants:- To search for the query we used to open a browser or specific search engine on the browser and then type it down. Then it was made a little easier, we used to say it out loud, and the search engine captures it by using a mic. Then process it and gives out the result based on it. This was also achieved with the help of NLP(Natural Language Processing) a subset of AI. Nowadays we have gone on a whole different level with this. We have voice assistants like Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa which does not even require us to open web browsers. We can just call them out via various methods provided by their provider and get the results.

There are so many applications of AI that the list goes on and on just like Infinite scrolling. But with the convenience always comes the price. We have talked a lot about convenience but now it’s time to talk about the price. After knowing the tradeoffs we will able to answer our original question better.

Here comes the hard part.

A big part of the AI industry works on Deep learning. Deep learning in a broad sense means, feeding a machine with lots of data and let machines predict the desired outcome. Using the above examples we will understand the downside of AI.

Autonomous Vehicles:- One big challenge of auto-pilot is solved by autonomous vehicles with the help of AI. But at the same time jobs of people, driving vehicles are gone. We won’t see any driver in the coming future, but there will be a virtual assistant that would ask us where to go or sometimes can take us directly to our destination by having access to calendar information. Any guess, how many jobs just blew in the ash by one application of AI? Let me answer it according to MIT Technology Review 3.8mil people job will vanish alone in the USA. Now think about the total workforce in driving profile in the world. They all have to reskill themselves for something else. It’s fascinating to see a car/truck driving itself. But there will be a huge downside as well for the existing drivers out there. But it is a harsh but reality that they have to face.

Infinite Scrolling:- What’s the difference between clicking and swiping. The answer is related to human mind psychology. Studies state that before clicking we think, but that’s not the case with swiping. If your brain doesn’t get time to catch up with the impulses, you just keep scrolling.

Creator of infinite scrolling feature Mr. Raskin said the innovation kept users looking at their phones for longer than necessary. And now he feels guilty about it. And one former employee of Facebook quoted about Facebook “You have a business model designed to engage you and get you to basically suck as much time out of your life as possible and then selling that attention to advertisers.” Here is the BBC full article telling in detail about this. And also here is another blog that I found interesting which tells more in-depth about the dark patterns in UX other than infinite scrolling used by big firms.

Conclusion

So, now you might have got your answer. We are not even close to making a real terminator/Skynet as we saw in the movie. AI right now is just touching the tip of the iceberg from the point of its applications. And my answer to the original question AI Boon or Bane is Boon. And here is a simple analogy behind it. A knife is one of the dangerous things we use in day to day life. But it always depends on how we use it. Let me know your answer in the comments section.