Emergence of Artificial Intelligence and how it is changing the world..!

Khushali Vasani
9 min readMay 2, 2021

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Artificial intelligence is impacting the present and future of every industry and every human being virtually. Artificial intelligence has acted as the main driver of emerging technologies like big data, robotics and IoT, and it will continue to act as a technological innovator for the foreseeable future.

Want to dive right in to Artificial intelligence ? Then you are at the right place ! Here I have come up with the apt and interesting blog for you!

WHAT IS Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think like humans and mimic their actions.

From SIRI to self-driving cars, artificial intelligence (AI) is progressing rapidly. While science fiction often portrays AI as robots with human-like characteristics, AI can encompass anything from Google’s search algorithms to IBM’s Watson to autonomous weapons.

How Artificial Intelligence (AI) Works?

Building an AI system is a careful process of reverse-engineering human traits and capabilities in a machine, and using it’s computational prowess to surpass what we are capable of.
To understand how Artificial Intelligence actually works, one needs to deep dive into the various sub domains of Artificial Intelligence and understand how those domains could be applied into the various fields of the industry.

  • Cognitive Computing : Cognitive computing algorithms try to mimic a human brain by analysing text/speech/images/objects in a manner that a human does and tries to give the desired output.
  • Computer Vision : Computer vision algorithms tries to understand an image by breaking down an image and studying different parts of the objects. This helps the machine classify and learn from a set of images, to make a better output decision based on previous observations.
  • Machine Learning : ML teaches a machine how to make inferences and decisions based on past experience. It identifies patterns, analyses past data to infer the meaning of these data points to reach a possible conclusion without having to involve human experience. This automation to reach conclusions by evaluating data, saves a human time for businesses and helps them make a better decision.
  • Neural Networks : Neural Networks work on the similar principles as of Human Neural cells. They are a series of algorithms that captures the relationship between various underlying variables and processes the data as a human brain does.
  • Deep Learning : Deep Learning is an ML technique. It teaches a machine to process inputs through layers in order to classify, infer and predict the outcome.
  • Natural Language Processing: NLP is a science of reading, understanding, interpreting a language by a machine. Once a machine understands what the user intends to communicate, it responds accordingly.

Advantages of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Reduction in human error
  • Available 24×7
  • Helps in repetitive work
  • Digital assistance
  • Faster decisions
  • Rational Decision Maker
  • Medical applications
  • Improves Security
  • Efficient Communication

How is it going to make impact ?

“AI is one of the most profound things we’re working on as humanity. It’s more profound than fire or electricity,” Alphabet Inc. CEO Sundar Pichai said in an interview and that is really going apt.

The emergence of Artificial intelligence (AI) has led to applications which are now having a profound impact on our lives. This is a technology which is barely 60 years old. Artificial intelligence (AI) is evolving — literally. Researchers have created software that borrows concepts from Darwinian evolution, including “survival of the fittest,” to build AI programs that improve generation after generation without human input. The program replicated decades of AI research in a matter of days, and its designers think that one day, it could discover new approaches to AI.

By the end of the decade, we believe the recent rapid advances in AI will eventually plant progress firmly into the AGI phase — the beginning of true autonomy. AI-powered machines and software will likely start to untether from human supervision, embarking on their fateful path as sentient beings. But this will happen much later in the distant future. In the next four years, however, we believe AI’s industry growth will start to explode and its impact on businesses and society will begin to emerge.

THE FUTURE IS NOW: AI’S IMPACT IS EVERYWHERE

Mark Zuckerberg giving his views on Artificial Intelligence at in 2018 at Viva Technology conference.

As Mark Zuckerberg said “I think that AI is going to unlock a huge amount of positive things, whether that’s helping to identify and cure diseases, to help cars drive more safely, to help keep our communities safe” AI truly has the potential to transform many industries, with a wide range of possible use cases. What all these different industries and use cases have in common, is that they are all data-driven. Since Artificial Intelligence is an efficient data processing system at its core, there’s a lot of potential for optimisation everywhere.

Let’s take a look at the industries where AI is currently shining.

Healthcare:

Administration: AI systems are helping with the routine, day-to-day administrative tasks to minimise human errors and maximise efficiency. Transcriptions of medical notes through NLP and helps structure patient information to make it easier for doctors to read it.

Telemedicine: For non-emergency situations, patients can reach out to a hospital’s AI system to analyse their symptoms, input their vital signs and assess if there’s a need for medical attention. This reduces the workload of medical professionals by bringing only crucial cases to them.

Assisted Diagnosis: Through computer vision and convolutional neural networks, AI is now capable of reading MRI scans to check for tumours and other malignant growths, at an exponentially faster pace than radiologists can, with a considerably lower margin of error.

Robot-assisted surgery: Robotic surgeries have a very minuscule margin-of-error and can consistently perform surgeries round-the-clock without getting exhausted. Since they operate with such a high degree of accuracy, they are less invasive than traditional methods, which potentially reduces the time patients spend in the hospital recovering.

Vital Stats Monitoring: A person’s state of health is an ongoing process, depending on the varying levels of their respective vitals stats. With wearable devices achieving mass-market popularity now, this data is not available on tap, just waiting to be analysed to deliver actionable insights. Since vital signs have the potential to predict health fluctuations even before the patient is aware, there are a lot of life-saving applications here.

E-commerce :

Better recommendations: This is usually the first example that people give when asked about business applications of AI, and that’s because it’s an area where AI has delivered great results already. Most large e-commerce players have incorporated Artificial Intelligence to make product recommendations that users might be interested in, which has led to considerable increase in their bottom-lines.

Chatbots: Another famous example, based on the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence chatbots across industries, and every other website we seem to visit. These chatbots are now serving customers in odd-hours and peak hours as well, removing the bottleneck of limited human resources.

Filtering spam and fake reviews: Due to the high volume of reviews that sites like Amazon receive, it would be impossible for human eyes to scan through them to filter out malicious content. Through the power of NLP, Artificial Intelligence can scan these reviews for suspicious activities and filter them out, making for a better buyer experience.

Optimising search: All of the e-commerce depends upon users searching for what they want, and being able to find it. Artificial Intelligence has been optimising search results based on thousands of parameters to ensure that users find the exact product that they are looking for.

Supply-chain: AI is being used to predict demand for different products in different timeframes so that they can manage their stocks to meet the demand.

Human Resources :

Building work culture: AI is being used to analyse employee data and place them in the right teams, assign projects based on their competencies, collect feedback about the workplace, and even try to predict if they’re on the verge of quitting their company.

Hiring: With NLP, AI can go through thousands of CV in a matter of seconds, and ascertain if there’s a good fit. This is beneficial because it would be devoid of any human errors or biases, and would considerably reduce the length of hiring cycles.

Are we at risk of being replaced?

Many AI researchers roll their eyes when seeing this headline: “Stephen Hawking warns that rise of robots may be disastrous for mankind.”

While AI technology makes our lives easier in myriad ways, it does have drawbacks. As AI development accelerates, experts and leaders in the industry have urged developers to be aware of technology’s potential risks. Scientists like the late Stephen Hawking and tech giants like Bill Gates and Elon Musk have all been outspoken about their increasing wariness of AI.

“A two-year study from McKinsey Global Institute suggests that by 2030, intelligent agents and robots could eliminate as much as 30 percent of the world’s human labor, displacing the jobs of as many as 800 million people.”

Job automation is generally viewed as the most immediate concern. It’s no longer a matter of if AI will replace certain types of jobs, but to what degree. In many industries — particularly but not exclusively those whose workers perform predictable and repetitive tasks — disruption is well underway.

McKinsey in 2019 , reckons that, depending upon various adoption scenarios, automation will displace between 400 and 800 million jobs by 2030, requiring as many as 375 million people to switch job categories entirely. How could such a shift not cause fear and concern, especially for the world’s vulnerable countries and populations?

Despite these fears and concerns, every technological shift has ended up creating more jobs than were destroyed. When particular tasks are automated, becoming cheaper and faster, you need more human workers to o the other functions in the process that haven’t been automated.

So, Is AI Really a Threat?

Does artificial intelligence pose a catastrophic risk? Do we need to prepare for Terminators prowling the streets?

In short, no — not if these risks are mitigated through principled, ethical development, and careful consideration from regulatory bodies. Experts believe that the future of artificial intelligence will depend on debate between a diverse population of people from different backgrounds, ethnicities, genders, and professions, in order to address the wide-ranging impacts this technology will have on our lives.

Impact of Artificial Intelligence — A Bright Future?

Looking back on history, it seems reasonable to conclude that fears and concerns regarding AI and automation are understandable but ultimately unwarranted. Technological change may eliminate specific jobs, but it has always created more in the process.

Beyond net job creation, there are other reasons to be optimistic about the impact of artificial intelligence and automation.

“Simply put, jobs that robots can replace are not good jobs in the first place. As humans, we climb up the rungs of drudgery — physically tasking or mind-numbing jobs — to jobs that use what got us to the top of the food chain, our brains.” — The Wall Street Journal, The Robots Are Coming. Welcome Them.

By eliminating the tedium, AI and automation can free us to pursue careers that give us a greater sense of meaning and well-being. Careers that challenge us, instill a sense of progress, provide us with autonomy, and make us feel like we belong; all research-backed attributes of a satisfying job.

You would be definitely having a interesting overview about AI. Do you have some amazing views of your own ? What are the exciting ideas informing your own views ?

Let us know in the comments

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Khushali Vasani
Khushali Vasani

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