(6 Dec 2022) In this article, Dr. Max Roser, the founder and director of Our World in Data, reviews the history of computers and artificial intelligence to see what we can expect for the future.
“When you book a flight, it is often an artificial intelligence, and no longer a human, that decides what you pay. When you get to the airport, it is an AI system that monitors what you do at the airport. And once you are on the plane, an AI system assists the pilot in flying you to your destination.
AI systems also increasingly determine whether you get a loan, are eligible for welfare, or get hired for a particular job. Increasingly they help determine who gets released from jail.
Several governments are purchasing autonomous weapons systems for warfare, and some are using AI systems for surveillance and oppression.
AI systems help to program the software you use and translate the texts you read. Virtual assistants, operated by speech recognition, have entered many households over the last decade. Now self-driving cars are becoming a reality.
In the last few years, AI systems helped to make progress on some of the hardest problems in science.
Large AIs called recommender systems determine what you see on social media, which products are shown to you in online shops, and what gets recommended to you on YouTube. Increasingly they are not just recommending the media we consume, but based on their capacity to generate images and texts, they are also creating the media we consume.
Artificial intelligence is no longer a technology of the future; AI is here, and much of what is reality now would have looked like sci-fi just recently. It is a technology that already impacts all of us, and the list above includes just a few of its many applications.
The wide range of listed applications makes clear that this is a very general technology that can be used by people for some extremely good goals – and some extraordinarily bad ones, too. For such ‘dual use technologies’, it is important that all of us develop an understanding of what is happening and how we want the technology to be used.
Just two decades ago the world was very different. What might AI technology be capable of in the future?”
Read more here.
