• Question: what impact will AI have on the world ? would we be able to co-exist?

    Asked by anon-208428 to Tori, Titus, Stuart, Hannah, Gill, Alessandro on 5 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Hannah Dalgleish

      Hannah Dalgleish answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      AI is becoming incredibly useful. For example, AI technology is now being used in conservation work (there’s a department at my university called Astro-ecology, they put astronomy technology on drones in order to look for poachers and endangered animals).

      I don’t see AI becoming another species any time soon. I think it will take centuries before AI will have it’s own thoughts and willpower.

    • Photo: Gill Harrison

      Gill Harrison answered on 6 Mar 2019:

      AI is being used in medicine and is being developed (I went to see a new development being studied last week). I think that machine learning, AI and robotics will eventually have a much bigger role in health care [and many other areas of life]. We will still need humans to interpret individual meaning, deal with the complexities of the data and how that applies to specific situations, check for malfunctions, and be the human side of patient care. I’m not sure I’m ready to have a robot tell me what’s wrong with me, without a human to answer my specific questions that relate only to me (we all respond differently to health care results, difficult news, good news etc – I would want the personal touch of a human).

    • Photo: Stuart Higgins

      Stuart Higgins answered on 8 Mar 2019:

      In my work I use machine learning, which is a kind of AI. It helps me measure the shape of lots and lots of cells, from thousands of photos. I could do this by hand, but it would take forever. In this case AI is just making quicker and easier to do my job. So AI can have a positive impact, and yes we can coexist.
      However just because it’s AI, doesn’t mean it is good. There have been some cases (in particular with the AI used by some websites to tag photos) where the computer makes bad or wrong decisions. This is because it has learnt bad habits from the humans who programmed it. So we need to be careful, especially as AI becomes more complicated and is used to make important decisions, that it’s making decisions that we agree with.

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