This year's Web Summit, in Lisbon, was all about artificial intelligence – and a robot sorting laundry. Digit, a humanoid built by the US firm Agility Robotics, demonstrated how far AI has come in a few years by responding to voice commands – filtered through Google's Gemini AI model – to sift through a pile of coloured T-shirts and place them in a basket. It wasn't a seamless demonstration but the enthusiastic response, nearly two years on from the launch of ChatGPT, reflected the excitement about all things AI that pervaded Europe's biggest annual tech conference. Talk of a bust in the AI boom could not be heard over the shouts of encouragement for Digit as it pondered different shades of garment. Nonetheless, the voices of caution were there, discussing familiar themes such as safety, jobs and the climate, as AI comes to influence a huge range of industries.

AI's effect on employment will be similar to the effect of spreadsheets on the finance industry. AI can get a bad rap. The idea that artificial intelligence can automate work naturally raises the question, "Well, what happens to the people who were doing that work?" While that is a valid question, most of this generation of artificial intelligence--the kind I focus on investing in--could actually improve jobs and even can increase employment. Most AI today is mental automation, the speeding up of mundane tasks of thought. Given the fact that most thought work is now done with computers, thought work is more straightforward for computers to automate than physical work.

The machines are not becoming human. Among those technologists at the forefront of artificial intelligence (AI) -- those developing its deep learning algorithms, probabilistic graphical models and layered neural networks -- this is common, if not humbling, knowledge. What the machines are doing is imitation, without agency. At their most sophisticated when fed massive data sets, AI frameworks, representations and programming imitate a slice of the human brain process. While exciting brain research initiatives are underway, almost every aspect of the brain remains underinvestigated and partially understood at best.

When will artificial intelligence develop aspirations? When will a robot yearn to have its own apartment? When will an AI that invented technology want to re-invest its earnings into better marketing for its product? When will an AI providing value to a company desire the pay and benefits its co-workers are receiving? As far as I am concerned, until any of these things happen, we should not even be discussing the concept of granting legal rights to artificially intelligent beings of any type.

In the mid-twentieth century when the computer and its applications were starting to bring changes to the world, sociologist David Reisman had something stuck in his mind. He wondered what people would do once machine automation comes to effect and humans have no compulsion to do daily physical chores and strain their brain to come up with solutions. He was excited to see what people would do with all the free time. More than half a century later when the world has exactly what Reisman wondered, humans are still working on a full-time scale. Work alleviated by industrious machines such as robotics systems has only freed humans to create more elaborate new tasks to be laboured over.

The subject of AI unrest is really easily proven wrong. While some only have great things to say about AI, there are numerous AI specialists who have taken a stand in opposition to the sort of negative impact of AI that can have on the general public. They also mentioned the analysts to investigate the cultural impacts of Artificial Intelligence. With the increasing use of AI technologies across industries, the important question is, "Will AI replace humans?" In this article, let's find this out.