WHY AI?
“One who grasps the unfair advantage AI proffers man asks why not
AI rather than why AI. ” – Alex David Pratt
AI promises to help mankind in a large number of ways and the
need for it is more apparent to some people than it is to others. AI has many advantages, and although it cannot measure up to the
vastness of human intelligence certain aspects of it make it quite
advantageous to us.
ADVANTAGES OF AI
MULTITASKING
One of the primary advantages of artificial intelligence (AI)
lies in its exceptional multitasking capabilities. Unlike humans, AI
systems can seamlessly handle multiple tasks simultaneously,
processing diverse information concurrently. While humans
struggle to efficiently juggle numerous activities, AI excels in
parallel processing, enhancing productivity across various
domains.
SPEED
Another distinctive advantage of AI is its unparalleled speed
and computational prowess. Machines, driven by artificial
intelligence, can perform complex calculations at a magnitude and
speed far beyond human capabilities. Tasks that would take
humans years to complete can be executed by AI systems within a
matter of seconds, revolutionizing the efficiency and rapidity of
problem-solving and data processing.
DILIGENCE
The diligence demonstrated by AI surpasses human capacity,
as these systems can tirelessly work for extended periods without
succumbing to fatigue. Unlike humans, AI maintains a consistent
level of performance, allowing it to tackle demanding tasks
consecutively and continually seek additional challenges. This
unwavering diligence positions AI as an invaluable resource for
handling labour-intensive and prolonged tasks with efficiency.
Aside from being diligent AI is also reliable. AI will not give
you excuses, in fact, in writing this book, I had identified a person I wanted to do the foreword but they were unable to make it due to
their hectic schedule so I just prompted Bard to do it for me and
here we are!
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AI VS MAN
Although our AI rivals seem to have too many vantage points
against us, let’s not forget that our irreproducible inductive
reasoning and perceptual abilities (generalization, stimulus, and
abstractionism) are still a long distance away from AI simulation.
Not to mention, our unparalleled ability to adapt to
circumstances we’ve never experienced before and our acute
discernment and sensory functions.
AI and technology in general have rifted a chasm in humanity
between those who are for technology and those who are against it.
The former base their apathy for technology on the apparent
plagues it has brought mankind in the past (Atomic Bomb) and
conclude that tech means more harm for mankind than good.
,Below I share a few dangers and disadvantages associated
with this technology.
DISADVANTAGES OF AI
MISINFORMATION
As generative AI continues to surface, people now have the
power to create any kind of content they want whether it is real or
fake. Deep fakes are a major concern for many, as more AI content
is being generated how will we be able to tell what is original and
what isn’t? With AI One can easily create an image or video about
someone that appears very real and spread false information or
tarnish the person’s image and it would be very hard to tell
whether it’s original or not. For this very reason, camera
manufacturing companies such as Nikon, Canon and Sony are
embedding digital signatures into their new cameras to help create
a distinction between AI-generated footage and original images.
Furthermore, there’s the innovation of AI watermarks too which
are a mechanism to safeguard against the dangers of deep fakes
which can essentially make people appear to do or say things they
didn’t say or do.
MENTAL DULLNESS
If we continue to rely on computers to do all of our work; we
will become lazy and mentally dull. Nicholas Carr talks about this
in his book entitled The Shallows. Designating all of our tasks to
AI means we have little or no challenges for our mind to remain
active and engaged; which will result in a drop in our cognitive
abilities due to low activity. This is why regardless of how much
you utilize AI always ensure you enhance your cognitive
capabilities through reading or engaging in other mental activities
that stretch your mind.
CORRUPTION
No matter how intelligent an AI is, it is still a piece of
software that accepts input and gives you data based on your input.
This makes it vulnerable to corruption, people can easily feed it
with wrong information and cause a lot of harm as a result.
BIAS
Humans are biased, and since machines are trained on human
data; this same negative tendency and flaw is unstoppably
transmitted to them. Do you know that face recognition software
from most AI from the largest vendors usually works better for
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light-skinned faces? This was because the training data used to
build this model was not diverse enough. The power of an AI
model is not only in how much data is used to create it but also in
how diverse that training data is. It is quite unfortunate that most
data is bias.
The downsides of technology are undeniable and to some
extent unavoidable, so it is with many other fields and domains,
and to be frank, technology is an amoral tool that assumes the
personality of its user. If utilized by a criminal it can be a very
dangerous weapon but in the hands of the right people, it can bring
great good to mankind.
On that note, I would like to talk about some of the several
benefits AI has for mankind, I’ll be showing us how exactly it will
be of help to our communities, businesses, and work. Artificial
Intelligence has crept into our lives in the form of helpline voices
or conversational chatbots. Furthermore, they help us to generate
images, process information and manipulate it in extraordinary
ways. AI has several applications and below we’ll explore a
couple of them.
APPLICATIONS OF AI
BUSINESS
AI can study customer data and observe trends and patterns to
guide managers to make better business decisions. Aside from
granting business people an advantage by helping them understand
customer preferences, AI is even redefining the operations and
systems of most enterprises. Many entrepreneurs are leaning
toward more digitalized modes of operation by building chatbots
and leveraging augmented reality (AR) technology so that
customers can try out their products. For example, companies like
Amazon and Netflix use AI algorithms to analyse customer
behaviour and provide personalized recommendations. Apart from
studying data to give wise suggestions, AI can also contrive novel
ideas altogether and get a majority of the work done.
HEALTH
Personalized health is the greatest possibility AI offers
mankind. AI can study an individual’s health reports and offer
him/her a customized health experience. There are already health
digital assistants that can run diagnoses and expert systems which
can accurately prescribe drugs. For instance, IBM's Watson Health
is an AI-powered platform that aids healthcare professionals in
diagnosis and treatment decisions. Apart from diagnosis and drug
prescription, AI is also helping to contrive new drugs altogether
and it is discovering precious secrets about human biology that
would have taken a century of research to uncover.
EDUCATION
Education can also become a more individualized experience
with AI. AI can create customized lessons for an individual based
on the best way they learn; if given enough data, it can even
modify those lessons to fit the social context of that individual,
making the content more relatable and consequently easily
understandable. Sooner than later, we will see the rise of AI
teachers who may be virtual personalities we interact with through
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the Metaverse. EdTech platforms like Khan Academy use AI to
personalize learning paths for students.
SPORTS
AI is widely used in sports, especially in the football arena, to
tell whether players have made an offside or broken other rules
that may occur too fast for human eyes to capture. AI also powers
sports betting, and chatbots and virtual assistants are being created that respond to fans. Hawk-Eye technology, used in tennis and
cricket, is an example of AI being employed to track ball
trajectories and make accurate decisions.
GAMING
AI proves useful in gaming because, through it, virtual
characters can be spawned. Characters whose spontaneous
personalities add another layer of fun and excitement to gaming.
No longer do characters in games have to be the same for every
user; two different users may have varying characters depending
on their preferences and personality types. Games like "The Sims"
use AI to simulate characters with unique behaviours based on
player interactions.
IT
Programming is a fun but relatively challenging task,
especially when it comes to debugging. Despite this, AI has been
able to relieve coders of the stress of debugging endless lines of
code. Not only has it been able to aid programmers, but AI is also
assisting IT personnel by reducing their workload to nothing more
than just inputting a few prompts and having their desired results.
GitHub Copilot is a classic example of such a tool which helps
coders complete their lines of code.
TRANSPORTATION
Sooner than later, manned vehicles will become nothing but
history. AI is the key to breaking the FSD (Full-Self Driving) code.
There are already working models of cars that can self-drive,
although not to the level where they can be allowed to, but at least
we are making a headway in building such technologies through
the power of AI. . Companies like Tesla and Waymo are actively
developing AI-powered autonomous vehicles.
COMMUNICATION
AI is helping us to communicate in ways we never imagined
before. Through this breathtakingbreath-taking technology, we are
even able to bridge the language gap; because through AI, we can
now communicate almost fluently to people who speak an entirely
different language from ours. For instance, the Samsung Galaxy
S24 has a feature that directly translates one language to another.
RELIGIONI am certain that you're surprised to find religion on this
list, but you really shouldn't because AI is already affecting
religion in a very unusual way. There are already countries where
AI is leading congregations in their ritual acts of worship,
conducting their prayer sessions and helping them recite their
creeds. Even Hinduists are beginning to embrace AI and
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technology in general. Another way AI is influencing religion is by
helping religious leaders prepare sermons and teachings. AI is not
only helping other religions, but it is even of itself becoming a
religion. Preposterous, right? How can a creator worship their
creation? Quite idiotic, if you ask me!
WORK
If you’ve observed recently a lot of tech companies are laying
off employees, Twitter, Twilio, LinkedIn, OpenAI, Spotify, the list
goes on and on! The reason for this is simple; they’re relying more
on AI to accomplish some tasks that were carried out by men
before. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report
estimates that 44% of worker’s skill sets will become obsolete in
the next five years. I talk about a couple of them below. We live in
an AI-dominated job market where work that was previously
humanly executed is now being carried out by AI algorithms,
hence creating a demand for workers skilled in AI applications.
This calls for a shift in career goals to better align with the
emerging technological workforce trend. You don’t necessarily
have to quit your job altogether and get into tech full-time; just
look for a way to integrate AI into whatever you do.
SKILL SETS THAT ARE LONG LOST TO AI
WRITING
Producing reports, news articles and other content is now
becoming a task best delegated to generative AI. Apart from
generating content, most chatbots can even summarize lengthy
texts, suggest additions you can make and enhance your writing.
To add the cherry on top, you can create entire books and content
you can monetize online.
ART DESIGN
Designing artwork manually is now old-school especially when
AI can quickly generate high-definition images in relatively short
periods.
FINANCIAL ANALYSIS
Financial data is complex to analyse but AI tools are making it
a piece of cake by not only breaking it down but by also providing
you with valuable insights on the best decisions you can make.
LANGUAGE TRANSLATION
With AI you no longer need to learn new languages the hard
way because there are tools that can help you to translate from
another language in real-time! These tools can translate not just
text content but even audio, videos and images!
DATA ENTRY
AI can retrieve data from different sources and insert it into
data fields without you typing a single thing. We all know how
time-consuming inputting data into spreadsheets can be, but I have
good news for you, it can all be automated with AI!
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IMAGE AND VIDEO EDITING
The skill I’m grateful for the most that AI has made obsolete is
this one because I know just how frustrating editing videos and
images can be, especially when the videos are very long and
boring. Guess what, AI-powered tools can make all the necessary
corrections and adjustments that need to be made on a picture or
video. Manually removing backgrounds from an image is now a
thing of the past, AI can help you do that in milliseconds and it
will do so with greater accuracy.
SCHEDULING
Finding the right time to schedule meetings or carry out some
tasks can be so difficult especially if you are very busy like me, but thanks to AI, we can now receive suggestions on the best times
available from our calendars thereby reducing the risk of us
selecting times we have already set appointments.
AI: FRIEND OF FOE?
As more jobs are being lost to the extensive use of AI in the
marketplace, a concern arises about AI proliferating the workforce
leaving many humans with employment. As more humans are fired
from their jobs to AI, you might be discouraged about this and hate
AI altogether because it may threaten to take your job, but do you
know that AI is creating more new jobs than the ones it is taking
away? So instead of complaining about the few jobs it is rendering
obsolete why don’t we acquire the necessary skills for the new jobs
it creates and remain relevant? I find it quite silly for mankind to
still be carrying out some menial tasks in this day and age when
some technologies can easily get it done for us. A certain service I
used to manually provide a long while ago was transcribing. I’d
listen to people’s audio and type it down in words, now I don’t
need to spend countless hours and energy doing so when I can
easily upload the audio to an AI software that can easily do so for
me.
AI is here to help and upgrade humanity to a higher plain, we
must embrace and leverage it to our advantage rather than hold
myopic pessimistic views about it. Does AI have negative
implications, undoubtedly, so does everything else! That doesn’t
stop us from using them it just makes us careful about certain
decisions we make in utilizing them but it doesn’t cause us to do
away with them altogether.
If you’ve used AI before to get something done and it felt
wrong, because perhaps you’re thinking it’s unethical to have it do
work for you and you’ll utilize it as though you created it, I have a remedy for you. A colleague of mine put it this way, if you’re
given a task and delegate, it to an assistant of yours and submit it
as though you carried it out yourself do you feel like it was
unethical? Certainly not! Of course, you may give credit to your
assistant for getting the job done but it wouldn’t make any
difference if you didn’t. Similarly, think of AI as a digital assistant ready to quickly help you out with a certain range of tasks.
Now do understand that AI is not here to replace your mind,
please utilize your brain as much as you can to carry out things
initially and use AI to enhance it. It is not wise to fully rely on AI to do everything for you.
I use AI a lot but I usually originally instigate the things I want
to do and only use AI to amplify it. For example, AI can assist in
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proofreading or editing a lengthy piece of text that I’ve originally
written or aid me with paraphrasing my writing or adding a few
more lines to it but not do the entire thing for me, that’s just
laziness. I actually wrote this book myself, I could’ve easily
generated it all with AI but that’s not my philosophy, of course
there are portions that I used AI to help me with enhancing but it
didn’t do the whole job for me.
There was a certain program I was undergoing that demanded a
lot of work, what I did was I utilized AI to deliver my assignments
fast enough but I always went through the documents we had to
read when I was more chanced because I understand that if I
entirely rely and depend on it, it would dampen my mental
prowess. Don’t depend so much on AI that you become lazy and
can’t even think for yourself!