Artificial Intelligence: Something scary or an opportunity?

Artificial Intelligence: a new term or an old one? Scary or an opportunity? The key point is how humans react...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere, we see it in the newspapers, reports or in conferences. Although it seems to be a very recent concept, AI was used in 1950 by Alan Turing who invented a test (Turing Test) to prove if a machine exhibits artificial Intelligence.

AI can support three types of automation:

a) Robotic Process Automation (RPA) automates high volume, low complexity and routine administrative “white collar” tasks.

b) Cognitive automation takes on more complex tasks by applying things like pattern recognition or language understanding to various tasks, eg. Amazon Go.

c) Social robotics involves robots moving autonomously and interacting or collaborating with humans through the combination of sensors, AI, and mechanical robots. A good example of this would be driverless vehicles.

Most of the times, this concept has been associated with 2 different aspects: progress-innovation and substitution of human labour. Let´s share some conclusions from several studies:

1. By the end of 2018, customer digital assistants will recognize customers by face and voice.

2. 85% of all customer interactions won’t require human customer service reps by the end of this decade .

3. By 2018, more than 3 million workers globally will be supervised by a so-called “robo-boss”.

4. By 2020, autonomous software agents outside of human control will participate in five percent of all economic transactions.

5. Much work will continue to exist as traditional “jobs” in organizations, but automation makes traditional jobs more fluid and an increasing amount of work will occur.

From my point of view, I agree that AI and robotic systems will be able to execute repetitive and low value tasks, giving us the opportunity to focus on other kind of tasks, such as: designing, adjusting machine algorithms or supervising/overseeing automated processes.

I see this as great opportunity and fear is the wrong response to technological advances. In the next few years or decades, we will continue to invent new ways to entertain, educate, serve and delight others. As pointed out by Joe Linsdale (founder of the Palantir, Addepar, and OpenGov) the human mind and body remains the most complex, powerful machine on the planet, and we will adapt and thrive in a world of accelerating technological change.

AI and robots may take our jobs, but better ones will emerge for us.