From Nasa developing self-drive rovers for Mars to suggesting the best wine and cheese combinations are best, there is hardly an industry that AI is not consuming wholeheartedly. Thus it comes as no surprise that the application of AI on a business level has been the most intensively researched and developed aspect, in fact, 28% of CEOs prefer using AI for data extraction.
Okay, the benefits are there so why the hesitancy? Well, Forbes beautifully summed them up into 4 points.
1) General Anxiety about AI
2) AI is a Job Killer
3) Bad People Doing Bad Things
4) The Superintelligence
Now before we blindly accept this I want us to take a jump back 3 decades to the introduction of personal computers. Yes to the time of DOS and floppy disks with only 1.2 MB of space (not even one Katy Perry Song). I want to remind anyone old enough or the rest of us who are post-millennial, of a term that once touched every broadcasting platform and news outlet. “Computerphobia” Yes People it was a real issue and was discussed everywhere. Fast forward 30 years and the condition ceases to exist. How do we go from a social concern which was discussed in every sphere of society to non-existent? Well in my mind the answer is simple. Humans are hesitant to change, that’s it.
Yes we don’t know where all this leads to, yes AI will take mundane jobs from humans, yes Ai in the wrong hands will be catastrophic, and yes present-day AI does not have the intuition of humanity.
But are these concerns really something that could materialise? Is it all black and white, good versus evil or is this a grey area where we could harness the power of technology for the benefit of humanity?
PS the picture above was created by AI image generating platform