These days, we ask ourselves, “Does Artificial Intelligence replace me or my job?”
There are numerous TV shows and movies with the scary plot of a robot or AI machine making crucial decisions for humans and their lives, which, to be honest, is a fair concern. I am sure many of you are already bombarded with AI ads on social media showing you can be anyone and can do anything at a very low cost thanks to various AI platforms. These possibilities open the door for many entrepreneurs, small businesses, and microcontent creators to open, launch, and operate their businesses in a much quicker and cheaper way. It is also applicable to larger-scale businesses to develop and manage their operations with a full-time intelligent assistant.
It's so great! What is the problem then?
Let me tell you what happened to a friend of mine and see how AI and robots fit in it.
My friend, Sam, is the managing director and owner of a food robotic manufacturing company. As you can imagine, he is extremely busy with business operations, and he is responsible for sales, finances, operations, quality, customer service, and everything else in the business, like many other small business owners.
With his busy mind and long hours, he was involved in two different car accidents in the last two years. Fortunately, no one was injured or hurt; however, both resulted in car write-offs by insurance.
The question here is, “What if it was a self-driving car?”
As far as I know, these accidents were investigated by the insurance company, and the faults were approved and the compensations were paid in full. Apart from people who were directly involved in the crash, nobody else was concerned or cared about them. But I can’t imagine a scenario where the car was in self-driving mode and caused these accidents.
Statistically, the number of mistakes and accidents is far less than human driving thanks to thorough checking systems and many cameras and sensors, but it only needs one major accident to condemn and shut down the whole AI-driven vehicle.
If the accidents Sam had were caused by the AI, who was to blame? The AI, the human in the passenger seat, or changed factory settings? Perhaps the insurance company refused to pay the compensation for damages, as it is impossible to find out whose fault it was. There is also the possibility of criticism of the car owner for negligence and careless action.
It seems that we have much more tolerance for human error than AI or robot error, even though their rate of making mistakes is far less than humans. We expect 100 percent perfection and delivery from robots, and any blunder, glitch, or inaccuracy is not accepted, yet it is impossible to achieve.
Any error or flaw by the AI, especially in the car industry, would be a great story for the news companies and probably be aired and distributed on all news channels and websites, creating a national emergency about the type of car accidents that happen tens of times every day in the same town.
Challenges we face in the era of AI
While everyone is so excited about all the opportunities AI provides and its simplicity and widespread access, there are still some challenges that we are facing. It is reasonable to say the first issue everyone has with AI is trust! From all ends, we are facing a new technology that we don’t know where its knowledge came from, how to process our information, and how long it is going to keep it, as well as the relevance and trustworthiness of export materials. We should accept this is a very new industry, and we are still figuring out what to do with it as legislators quickly act and crack down on deepfake videos. It is also a fact that we don’t know where our information is kept and for what other purposes it will be used, which meanwhile needs the attention of the regulators and governments.
We also worry about the future of jobs and if our profession, skills, and talent that we spent a lifetime mastering will be replaced by AI. While it is a reasonable concern, let me remind you of a time when “machine calculators” were introduced to the market in the early 80s. If you have watched the movie “Hidden Figures,” you see Computers are the role of actual humans who sit in a separate room and do all the mathematics calculations by hand (& brain, of course!)
With the introduction of machine computers, all those hand calculations were done in a fraction of a second. We can say the same thing about the calculator machines in the 80s that worried all education system teachers that students would be incompetent in mathematics and there would be no scientists or mathematicians in the future.
History proved these assumptions wrong, and we all see not only a decline in scientific progress but a huge leap in complicated subjects that seemed impossible to unravel in the past.
AI opens the opportunity to think and analyse tremendous amounts of information, learning, and arithmetic within a timeframe that is not possible for humans to achieve.
It allows us to understand the universe, process multiple scenarios for our future on Earth, and solve complex problems that we are simply unable to solve now.
There are so many new opportunities that come with the implementation of usage of AI, which of course requires revision in our education system, changes in knowledge assessment methods, and providing the specific skills the future generation will need.
As the invention and usage of calculators were inevitable and we learned to live with it, AI is not so different, and we will adjust and adapt to live with it, like all the major innovation leaps in history, some who are resistant to change will stay behind and eventually disappear from the market.
While we have genuine concerns about this new technology, we must prepare ourselves and our children to utilise it in a responsible manner and not forget about basic human principles and decency.
It is here to stay; we’d better learn to live with it!
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