Five Reasons AI Will Make Our Lives Better
There’s nothing “artificial” about the benefits of Artificial Intelligence (AI). These benefits won’t manifest everywhere, but they promise to be widespread, and that will continue to drive heavy investment, development, and application of AI to many areas. These benefits will be realized in five main categories, which I will call the Five A’s of AI.
A#1: Automation
This is probably the most common way we envision AI – where it automates a manual task or activity. Whether it be driving a car, tagging friends in Facebook photos, processing loan applications, or sifting through financial transactions looking for suspicious activity, AI knows how to find patterns – and identify anomalies – in large data sets. For this reason any pattern-based activity that has large scale, high value, or high cost (as in, complex and/or time-consuming) stands a high probability of being automated in the near future, increasing efficiency and speed, and reducing costs.
A#2: Augmentation
While AI will automate many things, there are probably at least as many things where it won’t fully replace humans. Instead will augment our abilities, making us better – and in some cases, providing almost superhuman powers, so we can act faster and better than we can alone. AI will serve as a tool, just as a calculator helps people with math. AI already recommends what you should watch next or what you should buy. This augments your ability to make choices. AI will assist drivers before it replaces them. It will point out the e-mails that need the most urgent response. It will highlight factors you should consider – but might otherwise overlook – in making decisions. It will draw the air traffic controller’s attention to a developing situation. Before AI replaces doctors, it will suggest the most likely diagnoses and treatments, and even surface less-known diseases for consideration.
A#3: Accuracy
Properly trained AI can – or eventually will be able to – do things more accurately than humans. This has the promise to make “human error” a thing of the past. This will not eliminate all errors; in order to provide benefit, it just has to be better than a human. As I described in my last post, it may be a while before AI exceeds the performance of the best humans in certain sophisticated tasks, but it won’t be very long before it surpasses the ability of the “average” human. We know AI is better at most games, and the best AI is better than humans at identifying faces, reading traffic signs, classifying images in a photo, and understanding speech. While improved accuracy shouldn’t be expected from all situations, keep in mind that computers don’t perform worse when they’re tired, or distracted by their cell phone buzzing, or hungover, or because it’s 4:00 on a Friday.
A#4: Acceleration
AI will allow us to do things faster than ever before. Particularly when AI entities communicate with each other, they will rapidly accelerate humanity’s ability to deal with new scenarios and dynamic situations. A great example here is interconnected AI doctors. As soon as the first case of some new, unknown disease presents itself, all AI doctors will immediately know about it. They’ll know the symptoms, the lack of a solid diagnosis, and what to watch for in the next patient. They’ll all know when the second case presents itself. They’ll know which treatments show promise and which ones don’t. And when the first effective treatment is found, they’ll all be ready to apply it right away should they encounter someone with the same condition.
A#5: Abstraction
A powerful yet commonly underappreciated benefit of AI is how it will aid abstraction. It will do this in two ways. One, by freeing humans from mundane and repetitive tasks, it will enable us to spend more time and focus on more cognitively demanding tasks – tasks that only humans can perform. Creativity. Innovation. Synthesis. Ideation. Two, because AI can identify patterns in exceedingly complicated situations, it will help guide us to better understand our world and the decisions we make. Where we would be overwhelmed by the number of combinations and permutations, AI will uncover information that we weren’t able to discern ourselves. In this way, we will be able to draw new conclusions and perform deeper research than ever before.
Conclusion
The benefits of AI are very real, which is why companies are scrambling to get in on the AI revolution. AI will help us perform many large-scale tasks better, faster, and either easier or more cheaply (or both!) than we can do them today. This is why I believe that AI will have a greater impact than any past technological advancement or industrial revolution. It’s going to be great!