The Role of AI in Shaping Tomorrow’s World

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the new technological challenge that companies treat as a rat race in terms of competitors, meaning constantly chasing to stay updated with the ongoing market tendencies and customers’ demands.

AI is the undisputable substitute for labor and expertise because it is cost-effective, doesn’t ask for a salary, never rests, doesn’t have cultural backgrounds, stereotypes, and prejudices, and hardly ever makes errors. It is evident that these characteristics make  AI  superior to conventional labor and, therefore, almost perfect for advanced and established businesses that will reach the point where they will have the necessity to implement this technology in order to survive the technological transition that is already happening at an accelerating pace. It is not a question of whether AI will transform businesses but when and through how many stages it will occur.

Scientists are saying that this technological revolution will occur multiple times, through several stages, and all stages would mean a reinvention of the business from the very core. Considering this, many proficiencies would become irrelevant. Still, new ones will be on the rise, and new skills will be available for people to learn, so in the following 2-3 decades, we will see unimaginable shifts.

With the advent of the computer, we have already seen companies’ transformation, dramatically and globally, changing our world in parallel with human interactions and behaviors. So, these transitions that are coming as waves wouldn’t be something that was not experienced before, but it would certainly be something we have never seen before, and the world that we know would be changed from the bottom up. In this regard, it is of considerable significance to understand the possible outcomes and how to transform the business and gain the necessary skills in order to meet the needs of the rapidly changing world and technology.

So, How Can a Business Benefit From AI, and Where Can It Be Applied?

The successful uses of Artificial Intelligence in business can be overwhelming. However, one issue is that companies can get familiar with or process the new technology and assess its utility much slower than the pace of inventions in academies worldwide. Hopefully, this will come to a balance in the future.

Let’s look at some concrete and general applications of AI and deduce its benefits.

• Shutterstock: Identifying and understanding images. Everything from an object to a cognitive concept is represented in an image.
• Recommendation systems: E-commerce websites can use a convolutional neural network to contextualize images for recommendation systems.
• User shopping behavior: Analyze purchases and categorize similarities. What are the customer’s likings?
• Visual search: Find similar items to the customer’s selections.
• Retail analytics: Track the most visited areas inside a store
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• Magic mirror: Customers can view various products on them.
• Object detection: Track and locate specific items in an image.

The field that is text-related is called natural language processing (NLP). For instance:

• Machine translation: Translation of languages. Think about what could be framed as a translation task. For instance, a movement of stock for one period of time translated into a stock movement for the future period with current adjustments
• Machine Learning: Machines that learn how to interact and how to deal with complex tasks or terrains. This could have an application in production, assessment, security, weaponry, and the list goes on.
• Data extraction: NLP has also advanced in data extraction from a whole written unstructured text that contains data. For example: “Employing AI in your business means automation of processes.”  Modern systems can recognize that AI is a technology and can extract additional necessary information from the sentence
• Text classification: Nowadays, AI is able to categorize sequences of text as positive or negative; for example, a sentence like “I fear technology” would be classified as negative
• Document summarization: This issue is still not completely solved; however, summarizing from a larger document has not been finalized in terms of AI, but the newer systems are able to contextualize longer passages

So we already have many examples that employ AI in their business: Google, Amazon, government, and we have interacted with them individually through our gadgets and the new ways of living. If we generalize precise application, we can say that AI will engulf all industries eventually, and for the next 2-3 decades, It will be applied in the fields of:

Healthcare 

AI will enable practitioners to predict diseases & identify high-risk patient groups and empower operators to reduce low-skilled, costly administrative labor.

Transportation

AI will drastically increase the safety of transportation. It would also be cleaner and easier to get from point A to point B.

Energy

Machine learning is being marked as the future super technology to solve supply issues and reduce costs throughout the energy sector.

Government

AI-powered assessments, predictions, and recognitions are critical for the progress of a country, and governments would apply them as a utensil to lead the way to successful policies.

Retail

Retailers are using AI to identify purchasing behavior patterns, optimize the layout, and individualize online and in-store offers for customers.

Education

Virtual and blended learning uses artificial intelligence software to intelligently grade students’ output, making hard-copy textbooks and manual education certainly go into history.

Marketing

Artificial Intelligence aids today’s marketers through the process of data gathering, data analysis, and data assessment to decipher customers’ personal behavior patterns and build long-lasting and active relationships with their customers.

Through AI, digital marketing or online marketing can precisely target relevant customers by tracking customers’ preferences and building data on characteristical behavior patterns, consequently presenting relevant offers to the end consumer.

Finance

AI is already employed as an automated credit assessment system within banks, such as e-banking, and drives simple but robust chatbots that simplify customers’ savings, spending, and investments.

Telecom

The introduction of 5G opens windows of possibilities to a new form of global mobile network that aims to be unrestricted by time and distance.

Everything That We Know Will Be AI-ed

From robot-powered hospitality, housekeeping, and home care to intelligent manufacturing and AI-driven music, performing arts, and dancing, AI is penetrating each aspect of our daily lives.

From bright clothes to devices that would allow you to connect the brain to the internet, enabling you to learn everything from kung fu to languages and other skills you could never have imagined, the future of technology is limitless. In a matter of no time, downloading an application into your brain where rewiring of neurons will happen through the installation of a single application which the brain, with the aid of a chip, recognizes as a new skill, and new neuroplasticity patterns will be formed, enabling the performance of any technique. Another instance is autonomous vehicles, which are also AI-driven and can be used in various forms of transportation. Autonomous flying drones can patrol the cities to monitor for security and identify criminal and suspicious actions or persons; they are already used for the delivery of groceries to home addresses. Autonomous vehicles and flying drones have also been used to explore remote or heavily obstructed terrains for scanning any terrain, and they are also used in the video production industry.

In medicine, nano-bots scan our health conditions internally and autonomously, then execute medical procedures when necessary.

People have already implemented chips within their bodies to interact with various devices, gadgets, or systems within their smart homes.

Even the smartphone and the wearables are technological extensions merged with the human body, so it is evident that from the very start of these technologies, we have already merged with technology, which is precisely the definition of a cyborg – human merged with technology. So even if we do not see it, the future is already in front of our eyes – the new era of transhumanism has begun; it depends on us how we will develop it., as the application of these technologies would be limited up to the frames of our imagination.

Possible Artificial Intelligence Consequences and Outcomes

The broader the prospects for invention and reinvention, the greater the possibilities. Eventually, however, it could turn out to be a double-edged sword, like every knowledge and technology that we have. We have learned how to utilize energy for our benefit and for our destruction. It could all come down to -“With great knowledge comes great power” and “With great power comes great responsibility“. Hence, we should be focused on reasonably seeing the ongoing evolution of technology and wisely assess whether it is necessary to hinder its development without understanding the sheer number of benefits that could arise from it. If the approach is emotionally unbalanced or biased, we would stick to the extreme positive or the extreme negative. Only reasonable thinking and taking into consideration the possible risks and hazards, as with any other technology or product, would give us a broad perspective of its sheer possibilities.

Scientists and practitioners are saying that we need to program AI with our cultural values, norms, standards, and moralities in order to avoid any possible future clashes if it comes to the point where AI  becomes super-developed and intelligent. At this point, hazards might rise to the “red alert” level. In comparison, in terms of different levels of Intelligence, an orangutan is physically more robust than a human, but because of human Intelligence, humans can make themselves invisible and invincible. So, human interaction with superior AI would be irrelevant to the AI and would make us quickly irrelevant or vulnerable.

We have already seen an accident where an autonomous vehicle has hit a human being. This is where legislation meets a dead end, as it doesn’t have previous experiences and practices in this regard, whether the manufacturer or the owner shall bear the legal consequences.

Meanwhile, it was always loudly spoken – terrorist hackers can use AI systems in various criminal activities or launch a terrorist attack, which was and is always welcomed by the masses, as well with the introduction of the internet or the computer, or the cell phones, as technologies. It was said that these technologies can be used by terrorists to launch nuclear attacks globally. But this never happened; we have never heard of this in the past decades, not even once. This would be reasonable and emotionally stable envisaging.

Another instance is medical nano-bots that gather data on our health condition. The case is that if these data are personalized and not sent back to a central system, they would be secured and could not be used for the benefit of third parties or the manufacturer. On the other hand, if these data are sent back to a centralized system for evaluations, they cannot be protected data and can be used for the purposes of the manufacturer. The point actually is whether these data would be used for the benefit of the user or for the benefit of the manufacturer. To whom shall the legal regulations be applied?

Another possible set of events would be the significant acceleration of the number of irrelevant human workers for the current known professions. But as previously said, our technology is developing, and so our world is changing; we cannot hinder this process as we did in the Dark Ages because following the advent of these technologies, new skills, and professions will be on the horizon, new knowledge will be needed to be acquired, reinvention of the self will make one catch up the rapid pace of constant technological improvements.

It is impossible to cover or imagine every possible outcome. As time passes and these technologies emerge, we can face scenarios we have never imagined or even reached achievements we have never dreamed of. The computing power of AI will allow the conclusion and solution of many issues humans have faced since the dawn of time. AI will go even beyond human concepts and present new ones. This could be a small step for man but a great leap towards the technological-human.

In Conclusion

For sure, Artificial Intelligence is not the robots that destroy human beings like presented in Hollywood movies, as it has a variety of applications and can easily do dirty jobs for us. At the same time, we could direct ourselves to more creative, innovative, and problem-solving processes. Artificial Intelligence has a lot of philosophical implications as well, and it will answer questions that we have philosophically presented to ourselves since the beginning of time. Artificial Intelligence doesn’t have the power to see a chair in a Pilates ball, but humans do, and this is our advantage over the technology; even though it outperforms us in many aspects, it is still not level to the human intellect and capabilities.

We don’t need to fear it; we need to embrace it to its full power and use it as a tool for further self-improvement.

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