Artificial Intelligence: Benefits and Limitations

Artificial Intelligence: Benefits and Limitations
Artificial Intelligence: Benefits and Limitations

Introduction To Artificial Intelligence

“Artificial Intelligence” – one of the most fascinating and futuristic concepts. The robots and humanoids you see in the movies like Superintelligence, Iron Man’s Jarvis, Transformers are all based on AI’s imagination. Artificial intelligence is a concept that focuses on replicating human-like behavior, perception, reasoning, learning and performing a wide range of complex processing challenges through man-made machines. 

The AI industry has been around for more than 70 years now (started with the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Project). The development has been growing exponentially with the advancement in hardware as well as research work. Today, we see various AI applications in different forms, such as AI-based games – Deep blue in chess and CHINOOK in checkers, Autonomous Vehicles, Waiter Robots and so many more. According to Statista, the AI software industry will grow up to 126 billion dollars by 2025.

Lets deep dive into Artificial Intelligence

There is a famous saying by John McCarthy, an American computer scientist – “As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore”. AI, in the simplest terms, means the resemblance of machine programs to human activities. Humans are the most evolved and complex species. They have greater cognitive, prescription, and logical abilities. The highest level of advancement in the technological front can be making a human-like machine; this is the core of artificial intelligence.


Artificial Intelligence is still an evolving industry where the work is going on particular areas independently. The prominent examples you can see around yourself of Artificial intelligence are – The Alexa, Siri and Google voice assistants. They utilise the NLP (Natural Language Processing) technology to recognise, understand and respond accordingly with the advanced algorithms and models they are trained on.

Deep learning is a subdomain of AI. It is dedicated to working on the principles and inspiration of human brain structure. The brain is composed of neurons connected to transfer information, form neural pathways and biases. Similarly, Deep learning models contains neural network and utilises data to train the neurons to identify a particular pattern, classify and form new information based on application.

Types of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is a vast field and has multiple types based on research, performance, application, and application spectrum. The four major division are:

1. Reactive: It is the oldest form of the AI system. It does not involve memory or previous data to make future outputs. They work on a limited set of inputs with an algorithm trained to give a certain output for a specific purpose. IBM’s Deep Blue chess-playing machine is one example of a reactive machine.

2. Limited Memory: Limited memory, as the name suggests, has the capability to learn from previous data. The machine learning algorithms trained for image classification, voice classification, recommendation engines are an example of limited memory AI.

3. Theory of Mind: Theory of mind is less developed and still a research-oriented domain of AI. It focuses on taking into account human capabilities such as emotions, beliefs and thoughts. The movie Robot was based on the theory of mind.

4. Self-aware: It is a hypothetical concept that is said to be the final stage of AI development. It involves the most complex human behaviour. This type of AI understands and evoke emotions, understand, reflect and interact with similar involvement. It can be said to the human-like creation of human. It will possess the beliefs and thoughts of its own. This level of technology is still quite far to come into existence anytime soon.

Advantages of Artificial Intelligence

1.  Medical and Healthcare: The health care industry enjoys the significant benefits of AI technology. Now, doctors can analyse large patient’s dataset. The Imaging and Radiology department reaps benefits by the machine learning models trained on high-quality images to identify the disease up to high accuracy. The devices are developed to monitor and alert doctors and patients on account of irregularities in body parameters.

2.  Automation: The industries required a solution for repetitive and precision-based work. They were the major consumers of labour, incurring high cost and low productivity. Automation and robots have changed the paradigm of the manufacturing and automobile industry drastically. Now, the assembly lines don’t have 100 hands; instead, minimum robots doing the same job with better precision and uniformity.

3.The solution to complex problems and risk-zone: Some places and problems are out of the reach of humans. AI can be a helping hand in those cases. The volcanic mountains that previously required humans to hang through ropes and take readings for research purposes can now take help from robots with high tolerance to heat and do the work effectively. The extensive computation work was the roadblock in the research field. Supercomputers today can do the most complex calculations in split seconds.

4. Daily Life: Artificial Intelligence has elevated our way of living to greater standards. We don’t realise how frequently we use AI applications. The Google search engine can be said to be the greatest AI application of all times. Everything you want is just a search away. The voice assistant switching off your lights of command, playing music, is no less than a dream come true. Google maps for navigation, YouTube for video streaming, Tinder and many more applications that make your life easier, all credit to AI.

Disadvantages of Artificial Intelligence

There are some significant issues with the evolution of AI. We can talk about the disadvantages of AI in three major categories:

1. Physical

a. Unemployment

The automation industry has been on surge after the second Industrial Revolution. Mechanical robots can finish the job of 10 men in lesser time and at a cheaper cost. The automobile industry, packaging industry and manufacturing industry heavily depend on machinery nowadays. These are narrow artificial intelligence applications. The deployment of such robots and machines has affected employment on a large scale. Robots have now replaced the jobs that were previously done by men. Thus, automation poses a serious threat to the employment of humans.

b. High Cost of Implementation

The applications developed in the field of artificial intelligence largely depends on data. The major domains, such as Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and NLP, use data to train models. The computation power and hardware requirements for large datasets and deployments are high.

c. Human Performance

AI is yet to achieve the details of human-level abilities. Some tasks still cannot be handled by an AI. It can learn from data, follow instructions and algorithms, but it cannot develop something consciously. Research, inventions, creative, original works can still not incorporate AI.

d. Weaponisation

Autonomous war machines, killer drones are a threat to the security of nations. It can be the beginning of a virtual battlefield. Many countries are working on autonomous weapon systems such as “fire and forget missiles”, surveillance robots, autonomous naval and drones.

2. Superintelligence

Superintelligence is a term referred to as a hypothesis at the level of intelligence attained by machine beyond the human mind and its limitation. According to the definition of Nick Bostrom, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, “Any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest”.

It has become a topic of discussion among researchers. They believe that a self-improving AI could become powerful enough to be out of control of humans. Owing to the intelligence, the Superintelligent AI can give it goals that can lead to the annihilation of the human race. However, its still an assumption and forecasting by scientists and researchers.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the three advantages of robots?

The three major advantages of robots are speed, consistency and perfection. The robots are less prone to human error. They are more accurate and can work longer than human equivalents.

How will the robot impact the future?

Robots will be an integral part of the future world. It will be used as household helpers, delivery systems and surveillance drones. They can take the place of many occupations.

Why do we need robots?

The robots can do repetitive jobs, high precision work, risk-included works.

Conclusion

AI can be a friend or foe at the same time. It has revolutionized the IT industry and given the most advanced technological advancement in history. AI has still a lot of progress to make.

The advances in the AI industry have given a broader spectrum of applications in almost all domains ranging from automation, cybersecurity, banking, automobile, and manufacturing.

Robots like Sofia are the milestone achievements of AI scholars, researchers, and engineers.

You can learn more about AI and Machine Learning in our course pages.

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