Artificial Intelligence in the Now
“Artificial Intelligence n. the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.”
-Oxford Languages
Talking robots and facial recognitions are some of the things driven by artificial intelligence. At first, we may think this is amazing, but when used wrongly, it is more terrifying than amazing. In some cities, facial recognition is used to identify criminals that might be walking along the streets. However, this is being done without the consent of civilians passing by and some are interviewed because they are tagged by the facial recognition system as criminals or someone who looks like one. This system can be discriminating especially if it does not have enough data to predict more accurately.
Speaking of data, we have been tasked to read articles about why Kai Fu Lee thinks that China is winning the “AI war” and to cut things short, they are way ahead in data. That is not surprising since almost every transaction in China is now done digitally — they even have a social credit scoring system which, according to the Chinese Government, will build a high-trust society of citizens that follow the law. Amazing? I don’t think so.
“Caught jaywalking, don’t pay a court bill, play your music too loud on the train — you could lose certain rights, such as booking a flight or a train ticket”
This is why, however data runs the world like fuel nowadays, it is important to observe data ethics.
Aside from the terrifying things AI can do, there are a lot more wonderful things it has achieved. Among the top is how AlphaGO, an AI program developed by DeepMind Technologies that plays Go, has beaten Lee Sedol, world champion of Go. To understand further why this is such a huge achievement for the AI community, the number of possible ways to play Go is greater than the number of the atoms in the universe — as of writing, there does not exist a super computer that is able to process that much data. To learn more about the game between AI and a world champion, you can watch it here.
Aside from this achievement is something that might be more familiar to us — Alexa — a virtual assistant developed by Amazon. As more and more people use Alexa, it also receives more data to improve its responses to your requests in the future, which makes it smarter and smarter.
It is clear that right now, AI has been making an impact on every industry. Analysts expect that people will be more dependent on AI in the coming years. As long as it is used with high regard for data ethics, the future is bright for us.
