Living in the era of artificial intelligence, such as robots, assistants, self-driving cars, and smart glasses, what will our lives look like once artificial intelligence becomes part of our daily lives? Will it be a blessing or a curse? The developments in AI over the past couple of years are both cause for celebration and concern, as the industry plows ahead without sufficient regulation.
ChatGPT’s launch has put a powerful AI tool in our hands, and most of us never expected it to be so advanced. It raises many ethical concerns, as well as the real possibility that robots will soon be taking over our jobs. At the same time, AI could be used for amazing advancements in medicine, technology, and education, improving our quality of life.
Self-driving cars: These autonomous vehicles will be able to travel with zero direct human intervention, potentially creating more need for travel and transport, but paradoxically less need for drivers.
Glasses: Google Glass was aborted in 2017, but in 2019 the company announced the Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2. With its smart glasses, Google wants to help us make the right decisions and avoid risks.
Assistants: Siri and Google Assistant already allow us instantaneous answers to a huge variety of questions. They’re also able to perform tasks on our technological devices in our stead. How far can we take this, though?
Robots: With their coating made to resemble human skin tissue and other uniquely human characteristics as much as possible, could we see a time in the future when we’ll be mistaking robots for humans and vice versa?
Dogs and cats: Remember Aibo, the robot dog invented by Sony? Let’s just say his offspring could become popular among pet lovers, mainly those who don’t much care for the downsides of owning one.
Politics: And what to think of artificial intelligence informing our politics?
Games: Artificial intelligence by Google DeepMind has already beaten humans at playing Go, a Chinese board game over 2,500 years old, while getting better and better at chess as well. Soon enough we won’t need any playing partners anymore.
Intimacy: Or partners for anything else, for that matter. In bestowing dolls manufactured for intimate relationships with artificial intelligence, developers will draw a lot of new clients to what’s already a growing market base. A life with someone obedient and continuously available without it being coercive is a very attractive proposition for some.
MRI: In healthcare too, a lot is expected of AI. It could, for example, help us detect cancer with more precision than the human eye using MRI technology.
Bills: Who would say no to a bit of help with all of their red tape and administration? Be it personal or business, artificial intelligence can potentially lend a huge hand in this field. For example, by paying your bills and/or taxes for you, after which you’d receive a notification.
Smartphone: AI in smartphones would entail automated task completion, watertight user identification, recognition of emotions, understanding of the way we speak, and, of course, augmented reality. Interested?
Virtual reality: Expect how we store our virtual information to become smaller and smaller. Cloud computing will become more and more common, and the physical world will become less and less useful.
Immersion: If we view virtual reality as the immersion of the user into a software-generated artificial environment, we could eventually reach a point at which all of our realities overlap, yet never intersect.
Speakers: Smart speakers will be able to read our emotions and choose what music to play based on those emotions.
Health watch: New versions of smartwatches, enhanced by AI, will help us make better decisions concerning our health based on criteria that we might find hard to measure accurately on our own, such as our heartbeat and blood pressure.
Intelligent houses: Thermostats equipped with artificial intelligence will be able to regulate room temperature based on the number of entities present and each of their habits.
Factories: In factories, artificially intelligent robots could start to pop up more and more, performing ever more complex tasks.
Cryptocurrencies: The great advantage of cryptocurrency is that it decentralizes the flow of money. With a bit of AI thrown in the mix, centralized institutions like national banks might not ever hold any power over the world’s monetary supply again!
Artificial intelligence: Currently, computers execute tasks based on commands and code. Artificial intelligence will aim to teach computers to think for themselves, using the human learning process as a model.
Limits: Of course, the rise of artificial intelligence has also caused fierce debate. While the loss of employment is at the heart of many of those discussions, questions also extend into the moral realm.
Choice: An accident in which a self-driving car struck and killed a pedestrian has brought to the forefront serious ethical questions. For example, should self-driving cars sacrifice their passengers to not hit pedestrians, or should the safety of their passengers come first?
Cold logic: Some say AI would be able to act according to “cold logic” and just that. However, others say that this “logic” is still the fruit of human thought and therefore just as vulnerable to the pitfalls of human prejudice.
Responsibility: It’s been proven that humans tend to consider machine knowledge superior to their own. Implicit in this belief, however, seems to be the removal of personal responsibility, which is fundamental to our rights, our duties, and our freedoms as citizens.
Deep learning: Deep learning is a machine-learning method for robots that’s potentially infinite. However, some say it should have limits. The moment a robot learns everything from its (human) intermediaries, it will also be influenced by humanity’s less admirable traits, they argue.
Tay: The most cited example of something like this happening is, of course, Tay, Microsoft’s very own AI chatbot that had to be taken offline after its Twitter account started tweeting inflammatory posts.
Babies: In what would be an ironic twist of life imitating art, our societies could at one point face the dilemma of having to choose between either creating, or destroying its artificial intelligence, as portrayed in films like 2017’s ‘Blade Runner: 2049.’
Art: Another interesting development is that there is now a robot that is a bonified artist. Ai-Da was created in the UK and released in 2019. She can create visual art with her painting arm and communicate about her work. She has had exhibitions of her impressive creations around the world. Ai-Da and other AIs with creative abilities bring about existential questions about the very nature of art.
Art: A German artist Boris Eldagsen experimented by entering the competition at the Sony World Photography Awards with an AI-generated image titled ‘Pseudomnesia: The Electrician.’ He kept it a secret until he was announced the winner, and then revealed that it was an AI image and rejected the award. He explained that he wished to find out if competitions
ChatGPT: In November 2022, the company OpenAI launched ChatGPT, and later a more advanced version called GPT-4 in March 2023. The AI-powered chatbot is programmed to simulate human conversation. No software has ever been able to so convincingly provide human-like answers, with an almost limitless resource of data to work with. To a certain degree, it can even write essays and stories, signaling an era in which many jobs could be taken over by AI.
