Artificial Intelligence and Robotics
The discipline of computer science involved with making computers act like humans is known as artificial intelligence. The capacity of machines to execute cognitive functions such as thinking, perceiving, learning, problem solving, and decision making is referred to as AI.
The capacity of machines to execute cognitive functions such as thinking, perceiving, learning, problem solving, and decision making is referred to as artificial intelligence (AI). Originally designed as a device capable of mimicking human intellect.
AI has progressed much beyond its basic notion. Intelligent systems may now be deployed to take over a range of jobs, enable communication, and boost productivity thanks to remarkable breakthroughs in data gathering, processing, and compute power.
As AI’s capabilities have grown, so has its value in a growing variety of industries. It’s in the suggestions we get on our favourite streaming or shopping site; it’s in GPS mapping technology; and it’s in the predictive text that completes our phrases when we try to write an email or do an online search.
It has the potential to be even more transformational than electricity. And the more we utilise AI and gather data, the smarter it becomes. AI has advanced at an extraordinary rate in the recent decade, surpassing human champions on Jeopardy. Automation, big data, and algorithms will continue to infiltrate new areas of our life until we can no longer remember how things used to be.
Just as electricity allowed us to tame time, allowing us to radically alter nearly every aspect of existence, AI has the potential to leapfrog us toward eradicating hunger, poverty, and disease, opening up previously unimaginable pathways for climate change mitigation, education, and scientific discovery.
Already, AI has increased crop yields, increased corporate efficiency, increased credit availability, and made cancer detection faster and more exact. It might add more than $15 trillion to the global economy by 2030, accounting for 14% of global GDP. Google has discovered over 2,600 “AI for good” application cases throughout the world.
According to a research published in Nature on the influence of AI on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), AI may operate as an enabler on 134, or 79%, of all SDG objectives. We are on the verge of tremendous technology advances that have the potential to positively impact our world in deeper and more profound ways than anything that has come before.
Artificial intelligence is expected to be one of the most significant developments in the technology sector (as well as many other industries) in the next years. However, just because it has immense promise does not imply it is without obstacles. And the difficulties and opportunities of artificial intelligence are not insignificant, which is why understanding and working toward answers to issues may assist accelerate artificial intelligence’s rapid growth.
According to research, cooling IT equipment consumes around 40% of total energy consumed by data centres. Companies are now relocating their data centres to colder areas such as Siberia in order to cut energy use. The environmental effect of data centres does not end with power usage.
Coolants are frequently comprised of hazardous chemicals, and battery backups in data centres, which are required during power outages, have an environmental effect due to mining for battery components and the subsequent disposal of the toxic batteries. Countries are enacting tougher data security laws that requires citizen data to be maintained on computers situated within their borders, making choosing colder climates beyond their borders a challenging option.
Companies in robotics and artificial intelligence are developing intelligent machines to replace low-wage labour: self-service kiosks to replace cashiers, fruit-picking robots to replace field workers, and so on. Algorithms produce and give us with possible answers or alternatives depending on our previous digital searches. As a result, AI is attempting to replicate human tastes and even thinking conceptions based on our digital footprints.
AI also raises fundamental worries about data privacy. Because of the algorithm’s insatiable need for data, our digital footprints are being captured and sold without our awareness or informed permission. We are continually profiled in the service of customization, which places us in echo chambers of like-mindedness, limiting our exposure to diverse ideas and destroying common ground.
With all of the discrete bytes of information flying around online nowadays, it is not an exaggeration to claim that the algorithms know us better than we know ourselves. They have the ability to influence our behaviour without our knowledge. Our device addiction, inability to look away from our phones, and the chilling case of Cambridge Analytica, in which such algorithms and big data were used to influence voting decisions, should serve as a powerful warning of the individual and societal concerns resulting from current AI business models.
In a world where the algorithm reigns supreme, we must remember that it is still us, with all of our conscious and unconscious biases and prejudices, who are to blame. We design the algorithms, and they run on our data.
The Nature research also discovered that AI can actively thwart 59 — or 35% — of SDG ambitions. To begin with, AI need tremendous processing capability, which necessitates more power-hungry data centres and a significant carbon impact.
Then, AI might exacerbate digital marginalisation. Companies in robotics and artificial intelligence are developing intelligent machines to replace low-wage labour: self-service kiosks to replace cashiers, fruit-picking robots to replace field workers, and so on. The promise of new opportunities will, in fact, generate major new disparities in the absence of clear policy on reskilling employees.
Investment will most certainly transfer to countries where AI-related activity is already established, expanding the gap between and within nations. Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook are collectively valued $5 trillion, greater than the GDPs of almost every country on the planet.
They increased their worth by more than $2 trillion in 2020, when the globe was hurting from the effects of the COVID-19 epidemic. In reality, while AI has the ability to enhance billions of lives, it may also reproduce, intensify, and create new issues.
Without ethical checkpoints, AI will exacerbate societal and economic schisms, magnifying any underlying prejudices on an irreversible scale and rate, and result in discriminating consequences. It is neither sufficient nor reasonable to expect AI tech businesses to overcome all of these problems through self-regulation.
To begin, they are not alone in creating and implementing AI; governments do as well. Second, only a “whole-of-society” approach to AI governance will allow us to build broad-based ethical concepts, norms, and codes of behaviour, as well as the necessary harm-reduction procedures, reviews, and audits during the design, development, and deployment stages.
To instil openness, accountability, inclusivity, and social trust in order for AI to thrive and deliver the incredible achievements it promises. Given AI’s global reach, a “whole of society” approach must be founded on a “whole of world” approach.