Me: Siri, Can you Switch off the lights.
Siri: Yes I can! Let me know which room lights have to be put off.
Me: Living room lights, dear Alexa
Siri: OK! Living room lights off!
Me: Hello Siri! Remind me to take my medicine at 10 am.
Siri: OK
Aah! How easy? isn’t it?
Siri, and many more virtual assistants use AI to streamline our mundane processes. We all are using AI based gadgets, apps directly or indirectly but many of us don’t know What AI is? So let’s take a sneak peek of AI and its applications.
We humans have been, are, and will forever be thirsty to invent things that would make our lives easier and better by a thousandfold. The capacity of what a human mind can do has always baffled me. One such major invention would be what is called as AI- Artificial Intelligence. Wouldn’t it be great if machines could think? That’s precisely what AI is.
We humans have natural intelligence. But if machines can think, it’d be artificial. So, AI is just a collective term for machines that can think. It refers to a technology that enables machines to mimic human behaviour. As we learn with our experiences, machines also improve on their past iterations, become smarter and more aware, and improve their capabilities and knowledge. AI is used in cognitive functions like learning, planning, reasoning, decision-making as well as problem-solving.
Smart assistants, chatbots, healthcare, logistics & transportation, sales, autonomous vehicles, electronic commerce etc.
But as the saying goes, “Every rose has its thorn”.
In the same light whether AI is a boon or bane, the answer is tricky. The fear of omnipotent machines acting like humans isn’t far-fetched. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, has repeatedly warned that AI will soon become just as smart as humans, and that will be a very scary situation because humanity’s existence will be at stake.
Ethics in AI has always been a point of discussion and given how successful AI has been in transforming human lives, we can’t think of our world without its active role. In the future, we will witness more revolutionized AI, with autonomous driving and flying in our daily lives, AI replacing many human-driven tasks etc. If humans and AI have aligned interests then both will go hand in hand, and if they don’t, these could be friction & conflict.
There is a need to discuss at what rate we can allow the technological revolution to continue. The future will be very different for our coming generation and there is a need to have more stringent policies to use AI for the benefit of humans and make groundbreaking discoveries.