Benefits and Risks of Artificial Intelligence

Ethics of AI: Benefits and Risks
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Ethics of AI: Benefits and Risks
Artificial intelligence (AI), also known as the fourth industrial revolution, promises to alter not only how we perform tasks or how we interact with others, but also what we understand about ourselves. The world is currently witnessing the evolution and spread of new AI technologies with astounding capacities and advantages: the areas of AI application are as diverse as they are extensive, from healthcare to manufacturing to public relations to marketing. The possibility that AI may not only magnify the already evident downsides of AI, such as job losses, but may also render humans obsolete has raised questions about the ethics of continued AI evolution. This argumentative essay asserts that while the threat of AI is real, the benefits outweigh the risks and that ethical AI can help advance human civilization.
Unlike humans, AI technologies are unbounded by human limitations and have therefore found widespread application in industries that involve routine and dangerous tasks. At the very least, AI systems can carry out small, repetitive tasks that most humans would not find enjoyable or meaningful. Humans grow tired of repetition after a while and our productivity as well as efficiency starts to wane as time goes on. Robots are able to perform repeated tasks without getting bored and can therefore free humans to do more meaningful things: large warehouses are now using robots to augment human labor. Robots can also perform these tasks with much more precision than humans who are prone to distractions and weariness: the pharmaceutical industry is already using robots to fill and dispense prescriptions. The immunity of robots to hazards has found use in industries where dangerous tasks are routinely performed such as in mining and bomb defusal. While robots cannot replace complex human interactions, they are able to take over simple interactions such as bartending and banking. Besides, their inability to wear out means that they can perform laborious tasks without stopping: in France, robots are now performing exhausting farming duties such as pruning vines, surveying field and crop conditions, as well as harvesting produce.
In addition to performing mundane tasks, AI can also be leveraged to learn, reason, and apply logic. AI works through algorithms based on programmed rules and its subsets: machine learning and deep learning. Machine learning algorithms are capable of learning from fed data and coming up with more efficient and accurate suggestions: giant retail companies such as Amazon and Walmart are using AI to analyze big data and improve customer suggestions of associated products. Because of their ability to self-improve, machine learning algorithms can also automate various decision-making tasks as is evident in social media sentiment analysis and chatbots, where AI is often the first-level customer support. The ability of leveraged AI to identify trends and patterns, over and above, aid decision making has a wide range of applications, particularly in healthcare. Clinicians are now using AI to investigate inconceivable novel research avenues, i...