The Impact of AI on Humanity | Precautions for a Safer Future

By now anyone has heard of AI, short for Artificial Intelligence. Even though AI has been in development for many decades, the announcement by the company that developed ChatGPT, Open AI, put this subject on the front page of headlines. But what does ChatGPT do? ChatGPT is a machine learning software that analyzes a huge amount of information that has been fed into it through various internet servers, and comes up with answers to almost any inquiry. ChatGPT is not perfect by any means. Sometimes the answers are completely nonsensical and filled with errors. But despite numerous malfunctions, it has tremendous potential. It can help with organizing, writing letters, creating rubrics and many many more.  I believe we are just at the beginning of the AI revolution and ChatGPT is just a small branch of a new phenomenon. AI holds a lot of promise for humanity but we can not leave it unchecked. AI, by design, will become smarter as more information is fed into it and at some point it has the potential to outsmart its creator.   

First, let’s talk about the positive potential of AI and there are so many.  Many experts believe that we even haven’t found the benefits of AI and only time will reveal how AI can help humanity.  AI has already been used in healthcare with helping physicians diagnose diseases that could have been missed by humans. AI can help with analyzing data in economics, investments, and education making some tasks that were impossible just a few years ago into reality.  

As a result of incorporating AI into humanity, we are running the risk of losing certain carriers. Just to name a few, translator, data entry, accounting and even some legal work could see their job vanish or change drastically.  

The use of AI can have ethical and moral implications. For example, AI can inadvertently lead to biases that lead to discriminatory decisions by companies in hiring, promotion etc. The scariest thing about AI’s intelligence surpassing humanity and making decisions without humanity’s input. They call this scenario singularity. Even though this is totally hypothetical, the consequences of such an event could be so devastating that precautions need to be taken to avoid it or control it.

In conclusion, the impact of AI in humanity is broad mixed with positive and negative facets.  I believe the AI technology is too strong and beneficial to avoid but we need to take reasonable steps to harness its power and use it to help humanity, promote science and peace. The governments need to make this issue a priority by setting up some rules and policies to avoid disaster in the future and yet do not impede the progress of this useful technology.