r/artificial - What do we need ai for?

AI is everywhere, but what it does is actually not unique: take a very technological development such as deep learning for image classification for instance: a computer system learns to recognize images of cats over dogs (or if you want more relevant examples, it can recognize for instance seals over rocks, or cancer cells over healthy cells). It's what humans have been doing and what we're good at. So what can AI do that no other human can in these domains? It can automatically count all the seals it finds in a huge sattelite image, or automatically count all the healthy cells in a given image. This would take the most experienced experts hours to do and is very error-prone, yet a computer does it in a few seconds. Hope that's enough to get you started!