Do you care about your best friend? You care about climate change?
Then you might as well care about AI too.
“Why?” you are asking yourself...
Because it is already here. And it will impact our lives more and more.
Someone tells you that AI is a new thing, just a trend?
Well...
You can tell them that the term Artificial Intelligence was coined by John McCarthy in 1956 when he held an academic conference on this topic.
AI has come a long way since then. Through many other technical innovations and research, and especially because of the availability of the two core ingredients of data and computing power, AI is where it is today.
AI is being used for many things. Here are some examples of everyday touchpoints with AI:
- Smart Homes
- Smartphones
- Autonomous Vehicles
- Banking
- E-Commerce
- Navigation
- Security & Surveillance
- Social Media Platforms
- … and so on
And this trend will continue and/or accelerate.
Artificial Intelligence will fundamentally change the way we work, communicate, optimize our health or learn.
Like the invention of the Internet, the personal computer or the cell phone. It will change not only your personal life, but also entire industries.
So, you might as well care, right?
Still not convinced?
Well, AI can help us a lot with today's challenges.
One of them is climate change.
Here are a few ways it can help:
- Preventing plastic pollution through an object detection algorithm used by the nonprofit Ocean Cleanup
- AI monitors can be used to improve agriculture, allowing farmers to get better yields and reduce greenhouse gas emissions
- Deep learning can be used to predict and prevent wildfires
- Using AI to build smart and sustainable cities
- Deforestation can be predicted by analyzing satellite images (Deloitte Impact Foundation and WWF project)
And the great thing is that AI is so much faster at analyzing data, for example. So we may be able to solve these problems faster and better with AI. Which is great, because...time is ticking.
But in all this AI excitement, we should not forget about the impact on society.
While an AI is faster than us, and the tool will increase our productivity and influence our job landscape, we need to answer the question of what kind of support people will need when jobs change or become obsolete. And who will take care of it?
How do we ensure that AI tools benefit low-income countries as much as high-income countries?
How do we protect people's privacy when their data is needed to make incremental advances?
How do we teach people to understand the biases and hallucinations that AI produces?
How do we ensure that proper testing is done? And that companies or developers aren't pressured to get AI products to market and potentially make mistakes or skip safety measures?
And what if Artificial General Intelligence is created? AI that surpasses human intelligence and potentially sees humanity as a threat or "getting in the way" of achieving a goal?
Suddenly AI becomes an existential risk.
You see?
First it can help us fight one of our most pressing existential risks, climate change. And in the next "moment" (no one knows when AGI will be here), it could be an existential risk itself.
That should be enough for you to say
"ah, yeah, I might as well care about AI".
Well, then the goal of this article is accomplished.
Goodbye.
Oh, and please tell your best friend. You said you cared about them. Or you could purchase our "might as well care about AI" design and spark some conversations around AI?