You must grasp the fundamentals of artificial intelligence (AI) in order to comprehend how it is changing the world. However, there isn't a clear definition of artificial intelligence that is commonly acknowledged. Additionally, if you try to look it up online, you will get dozens of definitions from other sources and individuals.
To make it more straightforward and understandable, we are going to sum it up as follows:
AI is a set of technological tools and algorithms that provides us with predictions, recommendations, and decisions to alter digital and real environments that are based on various data.
AI has two major subsets, which are machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL.) To provide you with the definitions of ML and DL, let’s draw the following distinction between how humans and machines differentiate between two objects. Without going into details about how your brains work, you, as a human being, can easily and quickly set things apart due to your past experiences. But how can machines do this? How can they distinguish between two things? They do it with the help of ML and DL.
Machine learning is a subfield of AI that helps systems to learn on their own from data without any explicit human involvement. ML uses various algorithms that utilize data to figure out how to improve, make predictions, and describe data.
Deep learning is a subset of AI and a method of ML that is based on the concept of artificial neural networks. Such networks help machines to learn from data, especially from unstructured data. It is mostly used in computer vision, image, and speech recognition.
Now that you are familiar with the fundamentals of AI and its subgroups, ML and DL, we can look at how AI will alter the course of history.
Artificial Intelligence Examples in the Real World
The impacts of artificial intelligence is not only visible but also tangible. Take out your Android phone and say, “Ok, Google.” Once you’ve uttered it, you’ll hear a pleasant woman’s voice. This is artificial intelligence in its manifestation as virtual assistants, or, as sometimes also called chatbots
Many major companies offer their own artificial intelligence assistants: Microsoft uses Cortana, Samsung Electronics utilizes Bixby, Amazon has Alexa, Apple offers Siri, and Google has Google assistant, respectively. These AIs can understand human commands and respond accordingly. For instance, Siri can turn the music at your place, or Google Assistant can type a message for your friend at your request, or Alexa can open your Uber app. But, AI in your smartphone will be able to go far beyond.
VIRTUAL ASSISTANTS
Most of you have probably seen the video in which Google CEO Sundar Pichai introduced Google Duplex in 2018 as an upgraded version of Google Assistant that can grasp context. The woman on the other end of the phone didn't suspect anything when the AI in the first segment of the Google Duplex presentation made an appointment at a beauty salon over the phone. She didn't understand that she wasn't speaking to a person. You could hardly tell the difference between a real human and AI when using Google Duplex. It could flawlessly mimic the flow of human speech, omit hedging words like "uh," "mm-hmm," and "oh," understand queries, and give human-like responses. It appeared as though two individuals were having a routine talk.
Google said on November 21, 2019, that Google Duplex can even order your movie tickets online! You can use the upgraded Google Assistant to book reservations at restaurants, schedule appointments at salons, and purchase cinema tickets. It is now accessible in practically all states in the USA. Who knows what this virtual assistant's next move will be.
On your phone, you can find numerous instances of artificial intelligence today. Because artificial intelligence transcends borders, it can be used anywhere. You can use your smartphone to identify the foreign characters on a sign in Japanese if you're visiting Japan and try to read it. This is another illustration of how artificial intelligence will fundamentally alter all aspects of life, including how we interact with the outside world.
Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Society
The futuristic idea of artificial intelligence that you might have in mind—flying automobiles or robots with AI like in Ex Machina that can easily pass for humans—is still very far off. However, a lot of people and businesses have great hopes for how artificial intelligence could affect society in the future. One of these hopes is for considerable advancements in medication discovery.
Many people think that AI can be utilized to find novel medicines. Indeed, artificial intelligence has the potential to be the ideal solution for many R&D facilities that are engaged in the expensive and time-consuming discovery process of brand-new pharmaceuticals. The effects of a molecule's structure on its properties must be fully understood by scientists. The next step is to determine what kind of ingredients can be used to create a really good and potent medication. Unfortunately, these chemical experiments usually end in an expensive failure because there are simply too many potential outcomes for a person to test them all. When trying to find the ideal qualities for a novel, potent drug, machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, can be a very useful tool.
Artificial intelligence that has been taught about molecules, their structure, and their characteristics is already capable of predicting a compound's traits. And right now, AI must quickly produce new molecules with the qualities required to develop the desired therapy. If this technology is developed in the near future, it will likely have one of the biggest effects on society from artificial intelligence in terms of curing deadly diseases.
How Can Artificial Intelligence Benefit Humans?
The discovery of new drugs may not be the sole human gain from AI. The search for new, sustainable materials is another issue that humanity is now dealing with and which can be avoided with AI's assistance.
It typically takes 15 to 20 years to discover a new material, but artificial intelligence is thought to be able to reduce this period to just 5. For instance, Northwestern University has already accelerated the creation and discovery process using machine learning. They were able to learn how to create glass much more quickly than ever before. A new form of material can also be created by artificial intelligence by creating new molecules and properties, similar to how drugs are discovered.
Impact of Artificial Intelligence in Everyday Life
What impact does artificial intelligence have on other aspects of our lives? One of the most obvious applications of AI is in the way we amuse ourselves, make new friends, or find our lovers online. You might not even be aware of this. As intelligent humans, we will always enjoy literature, music, TV shows, and movies that we find enjoyable. We use recommendation systems to select entertainment that we enjoy without paying much thought to the motivations behind our daily behaviors. These are but a handful of everyday applications for artificial intelligence. And chances are, you are extremely familiar with these AI-powered examples.
YouTube recommendation engine
Owned by Google, YouTube is probably one of the most popular platforms for sharing video content in the world. You can find whatever your heart desires — from various beauty and cooking tutorials to music videos, vlogs, and news. According to Omnicore, YouTube has 2 billion active users monthly and 30 million active users per day. Although the number of viewers is huge, the platform uses AI to provide viewers with the videos that they are interested in and block those that, for instance, might be terrorism-related or have any other violent nature.
Netflix recommendation engine
Why is Netflix so popular? It just knows what you want and what you most likely will love to watch. The company is at the forefront of the entertainment industry as the leading content creator. Its recommendation system or engine comes up with TV show and movie suggestions that are based on your viewing history. Moreover, Netflix calculates how many times you’ve seen a particular film or TV series, rewound, or fast-forwarded, not to mention how you have rated content.
Google Translate
It wouldn’t be fair not to mention Google and especially Google Translate, which uses machine learning to help you translate text from a source language to the target one. The company has a lot of contributors across the globe, which means that any person in the world can contribute to Google Translate by entering some words like synonyms or anything else related to languages. Depending on these contributions, an ML model is changing and updating itself every day and becoming more and more proficient.
Google Maps
Google Maps is probably another of those examples that can help us understand artificial intelligence in our daily lives. For instance, if you want to get from your place to a fancy nightclub, you use Google Maps. It makes predictions of what are the most efficient ways for you to get to the place.
There are some apps that combine virtual reality and Google Maps to provide immersive experience — just point the camera of your phone on a building and see information about it.
Social media sensitive content search and search
Here is another example of artificial intelligence in real life. Pinterest is a social media platform full of various images that inspire people to discover new ideas. First of all, Pinterest uses an AI-enabled feature to identify if the image you upload is of any indecent or sensitive nature and must be banned from the platform. Secondly, Pinterest has an option that allows you to search for the necessary picture using only a fraction of it. For instance, you really liked the dress which was worn by a local celebrity at a party, and you want to look it up on the social media platform. The chances are — you will definitely find it. With the help of machine vision, Pinterest is looking for exactly the same dress of the same designer, material, and color.
AI Application in Business
AI is going to be an integral part of almost every business domain. Automotive, marketing, and advertisement, agriculture, healthcare, e-commerce, criminal justice, and many others will definitely benefit from using artificial intelligence. Let’s see some significant examples of AI applications in business.
Artificial intelligence in the automotive industry
When you think about artificial intelligence in automobiles, the first thing that comes to your mind is a self-driving car. Even though hardly any vehicle is fully autonomous, self-driving cars are not that distant and obscure future anymore.
According to The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which truly believes that artificial intelligence will help vehicles drive us safely without any human intervention, highlights six levels of autonomous driving:
Level 0 or No Automation
There is no automation on this stage, and the person is fully responsible for controlling the vehicle;
Level 1 or Driver Assistance
The vehicle can sometimes control itself in some cases, for instance, in steering or accelerating. But the vehicle can’t do these things simultaneously, and human control is required;
Level 2 or Partial Automation
At this level, the vehicle can be in control. For example, both steering and accelerating, and the person can take control of the vehicle at any time. Still, the person has to stay vigilant as to the environment and conditions;
Level 3 or Conditional Automation
The vehicle can perform all driving activities, but the person should remain alert and take over the driving when needed;
Level 4 or High Automation
Such cars can drive autonomously and intervene when something goes wrong. Level 4 vehicles do not require human intervention.
Companies as Volvo and Baidu, Waymo, Magna, NAVYA are working on the technology that can provide cars with Level 4 capabilities.
Level 5 or Full Automation
This stage presupposes the full self-driving capabilities of the vehicle in any situation. Level 5 vehicles will be fully autonomous and won’t require human intervention. Moreover, such cars might not have driving wheels or even brakes, and the person can be a mere passenger while the vehicle is fully in charge of driving. Level 5 vehicles are still being tested and are not available to the public.
Even if fully autonomous vehicles might be unavailable at the moment, many automotive companies are on the way of producing such cars.
Artificial intelligence in advertising and marketing
It might be too early to talk about what the full impact of artificial intelligence is going to have on marketing and advertising. Still, the technology does have some good potential that can be unlocked in the future. For example, personalization is going to be the new black in marketing and advertising. If you target people using the same marketing techniques, tools, and methods, do not expect you’ll yield spectacular results in time to come. But AI can be a real game-changer in how marketing and ads campaigns are being run today. For instance, personalized advertisements are a hit with various companies. Such corporate giants as Facebook, Google, YouTube, have already been using ads powered by AI for targeting specific audiences.
Personalized pricing is going to become a new way of selling products and services. Artificial intelligence will predict the highest price a consumer can pay for a particular item by adjusting it according to the user’s behavior.
Artificial intelligence in the e-commerce industry
E-commerce has all the right to enjoy some considerable benefits of AI. For instance, you could not only use a recommendation system for entertainment, like Netflix or YouTube mentioned above, but you can use a product recommendations engine for your e-commerce website. This tool that uses machine learning algorithms can provide customers with a set of suggested products, which is based on their past purchasing activities and performances. You must have encountered this application of artificial intelligence for business dozens of times.
Artificial intelligence in companies
Artificial intelligence is a perfect tool for providing valuable insights to businesses. Using AI supplies them with information about customer behavior, their preferences, and the history of their interactions with a company. In such a highly-competitive business environment, it’s getting more and more challenging to keep existing clients, which usually results in losing money. Machine learning can prevent such worst-case scenarios. By analyzing your external and internal data, ML can predict buying patterns in the future.
Artificial Intelligence and The Economy
We observe a considerable influence on human lives, society, and numerous business spheres, but it does not begin or end there. AI is also going to alter the economy which will have both positive and negative outcomes.
“AI has the potential to deliver additional global economic activity of around $13 trillion by 2030, or about 16 percent higher cumulative GDP compared with today.”
McKinsey & Company
But with the advent of artificial intelligence, it is not uncommon to hear such questions as Will artificial intelligence take over the world and leave us unemployed? The answer is — it might. This may be a major downside to the impact of artificial intelligence on the economy. Companies across multiple domains are going to integrate AI technologies in many aspects of their business and it will definitely have an impact on the economy. For instance, the adoption of artificial intelligence will automate the manual routine of a worker, so if you want to stay competitive, you might want to require some digital skills. McKinsey & Company described another disadvantage of AI as follows — it is going to widen the gap between various countries due to the different levels of artificial intelligence adoption.
Wrapping Up
Artificial intelligence is no longer mere science fiction as it has long gone far beyond theories and assumptions. Even though some of the advanced manifestations of AI, like fully autonomous vehicles or a super drug that will cure major diseases, haven’t arrived yet, we still can observe its presence in almost any sphere of human activity — from entertainment, automotive, e-commerce to the economy. AI is everywhere — in the smartphone you are carrying around with you to IoT devices. If you’d like to scale your business with the innovative AI solution, reach out to LITSLINK, a top software development company, for help.
What you’ve read in this article about artificial intelligence and its impact on society and human beings is only a surface of AI. You can find lots of other examples and predictions regarding the future that artificial intelligence will bring us. But if you are already convinced about the importance of AI and thinking of using it in your product, you can contact us for more information on how to bring it to a reality. Our technology expertise is vast and extensive. Let’s build the world of artificial intelligence together.
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