If you have ever tried to contact FNB’s customer service centre, you might remember the awkward pause you gave when the chatbot (a computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users) answered with: “Please tell me how I may help you?” and you had no idea how to respond. Do you respond as you would to a normal living person? How detailed should your response be? And why did you say please and thank you if you were talking to a chatbot? What are the effects of Artificial Intelligence?

WHAT EXACTLY IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?

Artificial Intelligence is an area of computer science that emphasizes the creation of intelligent machines that work and react like humans. Some of the activities computers with Artificial Intelligence are designed for include speech recognition, learning, planning and problem solving. The effects thereof can be good and bad.

THE GOOD

Most people view Artificial Intelligence as futuristic and are unaware of how their lives are already affected by Artificial Intelligence. While FNB’s chatbot might be a new experience for many South Africans, the personal assistant chatbots, Siri or Alexa have already become the new normal for thousands of people around the globe. What many people don’t know is that as you use these assistants, they continuously learn about you until they are able to accurately anticipate your needs. The South African tech startup, Hey Jude, capitalised on this concept by creating a virtual personal assistant similar to Siri or Alexa, but improving the service and scope of requests by having real people “behind the scenes” attend to the requests. You can literally ask Jude to assist you with anything, ranging from restaurant bookings, renewing your car license or even prank-calling your boyfriend – all in good spirits of course. Hey Jude is a noteworthy example of the benefits of Artificial Intelligence and Emotional Intelligence (human) integration. As the tech mogul, Elon Musk warns: “humans must merge with machines or become irrelevant”.

Another exciting use of Artificial Intelligence comes from music applications such as Spotify or Apple Music. These apps use data to drive decisions. With Spotify every user gets a weekly personalised music playlist that they have never listened to on the service before, but that the algorithm calculated will be something the listener is expected to enjoy – eliminating the need for you to actively search for new music recommendations.

THE BAD

But what about the more recent report that Amazon had to scrap its secret recruiting tool as they were unable to rectify the algorithm that taught itself to prefer men over women or the malfunctioning of self-driving cars like those produced by Tesla, causing accidents and killing its drivers or innocent pedestrians. And probably the scariest of all – when Google employees quit over the company’s involvement in a drone program for the Pentagon called Project Maven. The project assisted the US military in developing drones that can spot and target vehicles and people by using Artificial Intelligence. Whereas current military drones are still controlled by people, this new technology will decide who to kill with almost no human involvement. And these are only a few cases that have come to light.

As per the examples above, today’s early stage Artificial Intelligence raises several practical and ethical problems. Artificial Intelligence systems are largely based on opaque algorithms that make decisions that even their own designers might  not be able to explain. The underlying mathematical models can be biased, and computational errors may occur. For the average person the main concerns surrounding Artificial Intelligence today should be that AI may progressively increase unemployment by displacing human skills.

WHAT THE EXPERTS SAY ABOUT AI

There have been some grave predictions about the potential of Artificial Intelligence from some high-profile tech experts. In 2014, the late Stephen Hawking wrote that the “Success in creating Artificial Intelligence would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.” Musk has furthermore issued numerous warnings and have gone as far as to state that the global race for Artificial Intelligence will cause World War III and that “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilisation”.

Contrarily, Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates publicly disagrees with Musk and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls Musk’s warnings “pretty irresponsible”. Zuckerberg continues to display optimistic views about a future where AI positively influences human life.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

No doubt we are in the age of witnessing Artificial Intelligence and digital revolution transforming the way we live quite radically, bringing with great opportunities for creating more efficient systems and achieving more growth. However, Musk continues to issue warnings regarding Artificial Intelligence and it begs the question if he knows something that the other tech moguls do not. In of his latest warnings he stated that “I am really quite close, I am very close, to the cutting edge in Artificial Intelligence and it scares the hell out of me. It’s capable of vastly more than almost anyone knows and the rate of improvement is exponential.”

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