Artificial Intelligence: opportunities and threats pg 209-211

What is AI?

AI is the theory and development of computers to make them think and behave more like people. The technology is designed to perform tasks that usually need human intelligence, such as decision making or understanding speech

How does AI work? Examples of the use of AI?

AI interacts with its environment, building on experience and learning from its mistakes.

• Smartphones rely on using AI to show you adverts (algorithm) that they think appeal to you based on your searches

• Driverless cars and flight simulators

• Farmers use AI to monitor their crops and the weather in order to decide on the best treatments for growing crops

• AI is also used to teach robots to respond to people’s needs

How can AI be beneficial to communities (especially in development terms)?

• New jobs and services

• Education

• Healthcare

• Efficiency

• Safety

• Providing information

• Environment: tackling climate change

How will AI create new jobs and services?

People will need to be hired to design, develop and build AI as well as maintaining it and fixing it if it goes wrong.

New opportunities for work

How might AI be able to benefit the education industry?

Intelligent tutoring systems offer students personalised teaching instructions and study strategies

How can AI be beneficial in the healthcare industry?

The AI Gemini can predict heart diseases by using retinal images and examining risk factors, including age, blood pressure, etc

How will AI improve efficiency?

AI can complete tasks more quickly and ignore irrelevant information, saving time and preventing mistakes from happening.

• AI can be used to process large amounts of data which might help for researching medical treatments

• AI is being used in healthcare to help guide surgeons’ instruments in difficult operations (‘Heartlander’ is a miniature robot that is inserted into the chest and used to map out the surface of the heart)

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How is AI going to help with safety?

AI can complete tasks in hostile environments, meaning that it can prevent people from being injured and save lives

• A ‘SmokeBot’ is being developed to help firefighters and rescue missions by collecting data from dangerous situations as it can see through the smoke and map out the area and work out risks like gas explosions

How can AI help with providing information?

AI can help by providing information as a search in a large language model or even Google that has integrated its own AI into the search tool automatically more quickly.

Other AIs like Alexa can help disabled people e.g blind to access information through traditional methods through voice activation

How might AI help with the environment/effects of changing climate?

AI can be used to collect data from the environment to combat the negative effects of climate change

• The Green Horizon Project is an AI that creates weather and pollution forecasts to help cities become more efficient

• The project helped Beijing to reduce its average smog levels by 35% between 2012 and 2017

• AI might develop new ways to generate energy in sustainable ways: search for materials as AI allows to analyse a lot of data

• It is difficult to forecast weather because an immense amount of data is required to analyse. Imagine the climate. However, AI might be able to do this and predict extreme weather events

• Cities are getting bigger and more extreme weather events

  • AI could check terrain that is appropiate to build homes (e.g Valencia DANA. Old buildings were unaffected but the land where new buildings were built were prone to flooding)

• AI might determine the most fuel efficient routes

How can AI be a threat to communities?

• Cause unemployment

• Widens inequality gap

• Lack of privacy and security

• Mistakes

• AI misleads and distorts info

• Environment

AI causes unemployment (ya lo hablamos) e.g replacing accountants bc work can be done much quickly and with possibly fewer mistakes

How might AI widen the inequality gap?

Developments in AI are occuring so fast it is expensive to keep up with new models/versions.

Not everyone can afford the latest gadgets and trends or even artificial limbs in healthcare.

Why do people have concerns for privacy and security with AI?

AI works by collecting data and info from the environments in order to learn and develop, but this can be at the cost of our own privacy (e.g ChatGPT learns through chats)

Companies that own the AI could use this data to find out more about our personal information, which can then be used as a tool to track citizens. This concern has led to bans in certain cities

What is another big concern about AI?

• Misinformation by distorting information, misleading people and people believe it

• Deepfakes

• Mistakes

  • Microsoft’s ‘Tay’ AI chatbot. It was designed to copy language used by Twitter users in 2016 and interact with humans but iit began sending offensive and racist messages as Microsoft had not programmed Tay to know what was inappropriate behaviour