AI: Interrogating questions – Idees

It can no longer be denied that Artificial Intelligence is having a growing impact in many areas of human activity. It is helping humans communicate with each other--even beyond linguistic boundaries--, finding relevant information in the vast information resources available on the web, solving challenging problems that go beyond the competence of a single expert, enabling the deployment of autonomous systems, such as self-driving cars or other devices that handle complex interactions with the real world with little or no human intervention, and many other useful things. These applications are perhaps not like the fully autonomous, conscious and intelligent robots that science fiction stories have been predicting, but they are nevertheless important and useful, and most importantly they are real and here today. The growing impact of AI has triggered a kind of'gold rush': we see new research laboratories springing up, new AI start-up companies, and very significant investments, particularly by big digital tech companies, but also by transportation, manufacturing, financial, and many other industries. Management consulting companies are competing in their predictions on how big the economic impact of AI is going to be and governments are responding with strategic planning to see how their countries can avoid staying behind. Although all of this is good news, it cannot be denied that the application of AI comes with certain risks. Several initiatives have been taken in recent years to better understand the risks of AI deployment and came up with legal frameworks, codes of conduct, and value-based design methodologies.