The pros and cons of AI

When we talk about Artificial Intelligence we are basically talking about giving a machine the ability and power to react or think like a human and act on it with a relevant response. People have feared AIever since it was invented. Hollywood in particular has done a masterful job of stoking those fears with movies like "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Terminator" and "The Matrix" all making AI systems into demonic forces.

There is no inherent good or evil of AI, it's about how it's used and implemented. People are just projecting their own misuse onto the technology. Once you look past the foolish fears, what you have is a technology that is hard to create, easy to control, and more of a threat to certain jobs than our overall existence.

There are some Pro’s to Artificial Intelligence

Humans get bored and tired as they work or especially when they do mundane tasks, machines don't. Which is why they are the best to do routine jobs. A.I. allows for more intricate process automation, which increases productivity of resources and takes repetitive, boring labour off the shoulders of humans. They can focus on creative tasks instead.

A.I. and cognitive technologies help in making faster actions and decisions. Areas like automated fraud detection, planning and scheduling further demonstrate this benefit. Big Data means datasets in the petabytes, far too much for a human to sift through. AI can chew through that data as fast as the Xeon processors in the servers can go and derive insights from the data much faster than any human could. A lot of the big data processing and analysis being attributed to AI is really just the work of machine learning. True AI would need to take things so much further; toward genuine self-learning using artificial neural networks that emulate the structure and functions of neural networks in human brains.

Humans make errors. Computers don't. AI processing will insure error-free processing of data, no matter how large the dataset. Judgement calls, however, are a different matter. AI-powered machines are doing jobs humans either can't do or would have to do very carefully. Space exploration is one of them. The Mars rover Curiosity is an example. It is freely roaming Mars because it examines the landscape as it explores and determines the best path to take. The result is that Curiosity is learning to think for itself.

And here are some Cons of Artificial Intelligence

People lose out to machines and there is no way around it, AI will cost lesser-skilled people their jobs. Robots have already taken many jobs on assembly lines and as AI gets better at doing complex tasks, even more low-skill jobs will be taken. Driverless cars is one obvious singular tech that will displace millions of human drivers fairly quickly, although the recent fatality involving a Tesla car on auto-drive may have set the whole effort back a bit.

The changes will be subliminally felt and not overt. A tax accountant won’t one day receive a pink slip and meet the robot that is now going to sit at her desk. Rather, the next time the tax accountant applies for a job, it will be a bit harder to find a job. Intelligence is a fine balance of emotions and skill that is constantly developing. Today, shades of grey exist when we make judgements. Our behaviour is an outcome of the world around us – the more artificial it becomes, the more our definitions are subject to deciding on simply right or wrong, rather than the quick mid-course corrections that make us human. Replacing adaptive human behaviour with rigid, artificial intelligence could cause irrational behaviour within ecosystems of people and things.

AI can be programmed with a benign goal but implement it in a perverse manner just because the solution is logical and efficient. So if there is a problem with the food supply, an AI's solution may be to reduce the population by any means available rather than find ways to increase food production or decrease food waste.

Eventually when it comes to us to decide if the pros weigh more than the cons or vice-versa. We should keep in mind that we humans have limitations that can be met by intelligentmachines. It would be smart of us to make use of these machines where there is a need for it and avoid it in places that would lead these machines to harm us eventually or worse take over.