The Fake ghost of AI

In the last few years, Artificial intelligence has achieved a great progress in many fields such as: Computer vision, Speech recognition, natural language processing, self-driving cars, etc. With the high ability of accomplishing more complex tasks, people began to have fear from the ghost of AI. They began to have fear from losing their jobs and be replaced by AI applications. Before you decide to be with or against Artificial intelligence, you need to have some knowledge about it such as what it can do, its limitations, its goal and how it can affect our world. In the rest of this article, I will try to take you in a quick tour through those topics to help you get some intuition about AI. No prior knowledge or experience in computer science needed to read the article.

The difference between what computers and humans can do

First let us know what tasks are best done by humans and computers without an intervention of artificial intelligence. Computers' performance surpasses humans' performance in Mathematical calculations. Computers can do complex calculations with high accuracy in milliseconds that humans might not be able to do in hours.But if the task requires finding patterns in data like detecting objects in an image an making accurate classifications of them, speech recognition(recognize the speaker in an audio and be able to transcript the speech to text), Analyzing text and getting the semantic meaning it and being able to reply to it(Which we call natural language processing). Those types of tasks, 5-year-old children can do easily with higher performance than computers.

The goal of Artificial intelligence

Many of the tasks that requires object recognition, speech recognition, natural language processing and similar tasks are routine and repetitive tasks that do not need creativity or making complex decision. But those tasks consumes much time and prevent humans from doing much more important and complex tasks well because they spend the most of time solving simple and repetitive problems rather than spending time in more important and creative work. Example of this is customer support agent who spends most of his time responding to regular simple questions like good prices, orders, colors, etc, and customers who have real problems that requires creativity and making decisions wait much time until one agent is available to respond. To solve this problem, computer scientists started to implement AI and machine learning algorithms that make computers able to learn to perform those tasks in high accuracy and performance from data available in the surrounding environment. With this new ability of computers, AI could help people to concentrate on the creative and complex parts of their work and leave the repetitive and routine tasks for computers.

Will people lose their jobs?

According to forbes website, 75 million jobs will be replaced by AI by 2022. This is not bad news because artificial intelligence is expected to create new 133 million jobs by 2022 which are much more than the jobs that will be displaced. Artificial intelligence is like any technology that has been invented in the past years. Each of these technologies has transformed the society and people jobs somehow. For example, in the past there were people whose work was to sell ice cubes. But when refrigerators were invented, this job was displaced and people who were selling ice cubes has learned to do other jobs, Also the invention of refrigerators has improved people lives and provide them more time for more important work. Another example is the invention of cars. In the past year the only available transportation was dependent on use of animals like carriage. With the invention of cars, carriage driver jobs were displaced and might be replaced with car driver jobs. Cars also saved people much time and energy that were spent on roads. Among jobs that will be created by AI, there will be simple jobs for people who will not be able to learn high skills and those simple jobs will serve AI algorithms like collecting images for datasets that are used to train AI algorithms to classify objects.

Artificial intelligence is not for replacing humans. It is for helping the humanity to have better lives. AI and humans should both work together to benefit from their abilities to obtain better results rather than they work each alone. In future articles, I will write about how this cooperation between AI and humans can occur in different fields. Finally, do you still think there are ghosts in our real world?!