We all talk about how artificial intelligence has entered our lives and has revolutionized it completely. Although this term has become widely popular in the last two decades, this term was first used during the mid 1940s. The term was then formally used in 1956 during a meeting which was being conducted by a few psychologists and computer scientists. Back then, no one thought that Artificial Intelligence would penetrate in our lives rapidly. The dynamic evolution of technology has transformed how we perceive artificial intelligence and its potential use in our futures ahead. Indeed, artificial intelligence has made manual work easy and quick. From 1981, Japan was amongst the first countries to introduce a 10 year plan aiming for a revolution in the world of computers. Their vision was to grow which they perceived as the ‘fifth generation’ of computers. Such computers intend to implement AI in their programming along with taking parallel processing on a greater level. With this plan, they even want to invent hightech AI machines which are fully functional for reasoning, implementing the language of humans and make conclusions, judgements and complete tasks. Similar to these 10 year plans, governments and industries from across the globe have shown interest and started investing in research dedicated to artificial intelligence.
Well, all this does sound glorified and moving, still Artificial Intelligence has faced backlash and negative feedback. One on hand people are talking about the revolutions and new innovations in AI, on the other hand there are myths and apprehensions about the technology too.
Let us have a look at some of the misconceptions we commonly come across about AI;
- Human intervention is not needed in AI: We often hear that AI makes tasks automated while striking off the human effort. It is assumed that AI has the ability of self learning and analyzing. However, it is not true. This technology has not developed in such a dynamic manner and surely needs human assistance to strike off biases, prepare training data sets, identify errors and also improve the bugs and make the systems more efficient and effective. AI will always need human assistance as the technology is a birth by humans and will always be a developing model which will get advanced with time by human intervention.
- Artificial Intelligence is the same as machine learning: We often come across these two terms whenever we are talking about technology. These two words are even used together often and misunderstood. Breaking the myth, artificial intelligence and machine learning are not the same things. Although they are closely related but not completely the same. Tech companies along with their PR teams and reporters tend to play mind games with their customers which leads to such complications while understanding these two terms. Artificial Intelligence is a broad term which uses different approaches in order to mimic human intelligence in an efficient and automated way. Machine learning is an approach which comes under artificial intelligence. The main agenda of machine learning is to make machines understand the provided information and deliver the intended output through an improved mechanism. Artificial Intelligence intends to develop machines that are realistic and cloned like humans. Whereas machine learning aims towards machines which are capable of understanding humans and their ideology along with their working.
- AI will replace human jobs: Ever Since there has been an advancement in the technology sector, we have come across apprehensions about artificial intelligence taking away human jobs. This fear has always been present in the minds of employees as soon as Artificial Intelligence started evolving in companies across the globe. However, people fail to overlook the broader picture here! With the advent of artificial intelligence, the jobs of humans will only scale up. Artificial Intelligence, in order to be more efficient and accurate, needs human intelligence. The technology still needs humans to operate it and fix its bugs and glitches. In recent times, we have witnessed the demand for AI based jobs growing on a dynamic scale which is a great opportunity for students to pursue studies related to this field. The true reality is that this area of technology has a lot of scope for people as there is a huge demand for skilled minds to develop artificial intelligence. It is predicted that by the end of 2025, AI will replace around 85 million jobs across the globe. Although the figure sounds really terrific, it should be noted that where AI is replacing the jobs, on the other hand it is also promoting more jobs than it is replacing. Indeed companies are working on developing an AI system which can replace low skilled labor work, still there is no successful fully functional system for the same. No technology can truly replace the highly valuable skills of humans.
- AI and its relevance to objectivity: It is a common presumption that AI systems are objective. But reality is contradictory to this claim. There may be default biases in the systems because of the preferences which are present sometimes unintentionally or intentionally. However, these systems work on the data on which they are developed.
- AI systems are highly complex: One of the most common assumptions about AI systems is that they are complex and difficult to be comprehended by common human beings. Some AI systems, like most of those human-based operations and traditional software, are simple and easy to comprehend. One of the rich fields of research on AI is AI explainability which aims in establishing reasoning on the working of certain systems in a particular way. It also aims towards a transparent decision making process. Although understanding AI completely is still not truly possible, it is much easier to understand how AI makes a decision than a human decision making process.
It is true that Artificial Intelligence is influencing how we perceive the world and how companies are adopting the world of AI into their workspaces. Still there are biases, misconceptions and myths present hampering the growth of this technology. A properly trained, transparent and efficient use of this technology can transform how the world sees AI as an evolving technology. Artificial Intelligence is a technology which will not rule over humans but act as a companion in bringing more accuracy and credibility to the work of humans.
