Intelligence, Artificial by Nature

I recently attended an amazing and informative event about Artificial Intelligence (AI) titled “Machines Can See” and that triggered my mind to pen some thoughts on the subject. I am, by no means an expert or even highly knowledgeable on the subject so this will be a layman POV on the subject at best.

AI has become the technological buzz word of this decade. And as like all other buzzwords preceding it, the world is abuzz with (conspiracy) theories propagated by the couch pundits, silently fuelling the creation of copious amounts of social media content which incidentally will become the very data that AI will be used to mine.

AI or Artificial Intelligence as is the coined term is a curious twist of words considering that at the root of it is human intelligence of the developers who create the neural networks, computer vision and machine learning models that seem to be the back bone of AI. So it could be described as “Artificially created Intelligence, by naturally intelligent individuals to perform most of the tasks that ordinarily would require humans to use their natural intelligence to complete”. Irony is that the AI created by humans is able to do most of these tasks better than the humans themselves.

"Artificial intelligence is created by naturally intelligent human beings"

Some of the challenges / changes that will be encountered with the mass deployment of AI that come to my mind ;

• AI will discourage human innovation and usage of grey matter to resolve day to day issues for the majority of the masses, leaving it to the select few who work in the AI development area to figure out the solutions and automate them. Research and analytical skills will be the next victims. In my opinion, this in turn will lead to eventual degradation of human intelligence over the coming generations.
• Will reduce the skill-for-jobs spectrum to two major parts v.i.z. technical jobs and physical labour oriented jobs for the most part. Most administrative fields will be taken over by generative AI computing devices.
• All countries will have to do a major upgrade to their cyber-crime divisions in a hurry as the speed at which generative AI is being developed is quite fast and human skill development is a time consuming process involving cost, time and resources that may not be available in time.
• The arts and music fields will suffer hugely as generative AI will create art and music faster and cheaper, so human creativity will become more dearer and out of reach of the common people.

I personally do not subscribe to the doomsday theory that machines will completely take over the world (although this is a theoretical possibility) because as has been see till date…science has never been able to replicate the human body yet in its physicality with a machine so adding the mental thinking and reasoning and emotional intelligence to the mix is possibly a bridge too far.

The current and next generation will suffer the worst impact of this deployment of generative AI as the infrastructure around them is not ready for this change and a lot of critical adjustments will have to be made by these generations. The hope is that infrastructure upgrades and skills development catch up with the generative AI deployment era in the next 2 generations time span so it gets easier for the following generations.

I do believe that generative AI has its good side as well and it will improve some parts of the human life as we know it today, one such idea that is already being talked about as “AI for the Good”. I personally hope that the AI version of digital CSR activity becomes as mainstream as normal CSR is, among major corporates today and maybe regulators make it mandatory for any AI solution provider to create an AI based solution for the good of society and humanity before they are allowed to market, deploy and earn from a commercial AI product.

The subject of AI is a huge ocean of possibilities, most being good and some potentially capable of harm and this article may have barely scratched the surface, but as we go along and I grow younger in my mind, towards my life’s sunset, I shall learn more about it and who knows maybe even get to use some of it in my lifetime.