The Future of AI: How Artificial Intelligence Will Change the World

If it feels like the future of AI is a rapidly changing landscape, that’s because the present
innovations in the field of artificial intelligence are accelerating at such a blazing-fast pace that
it’s tough to keep up.

Indeed, artificial intelligence is shaping the future of humanity across nearly every industry. It is
already the main driver of emerging technologies like big data, robotics and IoT — not to
mention generative AI, with tools like ChatGPT and AI art generators garnering mainstream
attention — and it will continue to act as a technological innovator for the foreseeable future.

Roughly 44 percent of companies are looking to make serious investments in AI and integrate it
into their businesses. And of the 9,130 patents received by IBM inventors in 2021, 2,300 were
AI-related.

The Evolution of AI

AI’s influence on technology is due in part because of how it impacts computing. Through AI,
computers have the ability to harness massive amounts of data and use their learned intelligence
to make optimal decisions and discoveries in fractions of the time that it would take humans.

AI has come a long way since 1951, when the first documented success of an AI computer
program was written by Christopher Strachey, whose checkers program completed a whole game
on the Ferranti Mark I computer at the University of Manchester.

Since then, AI has been used to help sequence RNA for vaccines and model human speech,
technologies that rely on model- and algorithm-based machine learning and increasingly focus
on perception, reasoning and generalization. With innovations like these, AI has re-taken center
stage like never before — and it won’t cede the spotlight anytime soon.

What Industries Will AI Change?

There’s virtually no major industry that modern AI — more specifically, “narrow AI,” which
performs objective functions using data-trained models and often falls into the categories of deep
learning or machine learning — hasn’t already affected. That’s especially true in the past few
years, as data collection and analysis has ramped up considerably thanks to
robust IoT connectivity, the proliferation of connected devices and ever-speedier computer
processing.

“I think anybody making assumptions about the capabilities of intelligent software capping out at
some point are mistaken,” David Vandegrift, CTO and co-founder of the customer relationship
management firm 4Degrees, said.
With companies spending billions of dollars on AI products and services annually, tech giants
like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon spending billions to create those products and
services, universities making AI a more prominent part of their curricula and the U.S.
Department of Defense upping its AI game, big things are bound to happen.

“Lots of industries go through this pattern of winter, winter, and then an eternal spring,” former
Google Brain leader and Baidu chief scientist Andrew Ng told ZDNet. “We may be in the eternal
spring of AI.”

Some sectors are at the start of their AI journey, others are veteran travelers. Both have a long
way to go. Regardless, the impact AI is having on our present day lives is hard to ignore.

AI IN MANUFACTURING

Manufacturing has been benefiting from AI for years. With AI-enabled robotic arms and other
manufacturing bots dating back to the 1960s and 1970s, the industry has adapted well to the
powers of AI. These industrial robots typically work alongside humans to perform a limited
range of tasks like assembly and stacking, and predictive analysis sensors keep equipment
running smoothly.

AI IN HEALTHCARE

It may seem unlikely, but AI healthcare is already changing the way humans interact with
medical providers. Thanks to its big data analysis capabilities, AI helps identify diseases more
quickly and accurately, speed up and streamline drug discovery and even monitor patients
through virtual nursing assistants.

AI IN EDUCATION

AI in education will change the way humans of all ages learn. AI’s use of machine
learning, natural language processing and facial recognition help digitize textbooks, detect
plagiarism and gauge the emotions of students to help determine who’s struggling or bored. Both
presently and in the future, AI tailors the experience of learning to student’s individual needs.

AI IN MEDIA

Journalism is harnessing AI too, and will continue to benefit from it. One example can be seen in
The Associated Press’ use of Automated Insights, which produces thousands of earning reports
stories per year. But as generative AI writing tools, such as ChatGPT, enter the
market, questions about their use in journalism abound.
AI IN CUSTOMER SERVICE

Most people dread getting a robo-call, but AI in customer service can provide the industry with
data-driven tools that bring meaningful insights to both the customer and the provider. AI tools
powering the customer service industry come in the form of chatbots and virtual assistants.

The Impact of AI on Society

HOW AI WILL CHANGE WORK

In the warehouses of online giant and AI powerhouse Amazon, which buzz with more than
100,000 robots, picking and packing functions are still performed by humans — but that will
change.

Lee’s opinion was echoed by Infosys president Mohit Joshi, who told the New York Times,
“People are looking to achieve very big numbers. Earlier they had incremental, five to 10 percent
goals in reducing their workforce. Now they’re saying, ‘Why can’t we do it with one percent of
the people we have?’”

On a more upbeat note, Lee stressed that today’s AI is useless in two significant ways: it has no
creativity and no capacity for compassion or love. Rather, it’s “a tool to amplify human
creativity.” His solution? Those with jobs that involve repetitive or routine tasks must learn new
skills so as not to be left by the wayside. Amazon even offers its employees money to train for
jobs at other companies.

“One of the absolute prerequisites for AI to be successful in many [areas] is that we invest
tremendously in education to retrain people for new jobs,” said Klara Nahrstedt, a computer
science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and director of the school’s
Coordinated Science Laboratory.

She’s concerned that’s not happening widely or often enough. Marc Gyongyosi, founder
of Onetrack.AI, is even more specific.

“People need to learn about programming like they learn a new language,” he said. “And they
need to do that as early as possible because it really is the future. In the future, if you don’t know
coding, you don’t know programming, it’s only going to get more difficult.”

While many of those who are forced out of jobs by technology will find new ones, Vandegrift
said, that won’t happen overnight. As with America’s transition from an agricultural to an
industrial economy during the Industrial Revolution, which played a big role in causing the Great
Depression, people eventually got back on their feet. The short-term impact, however, was
massive.
“The transition between jobs going away and new ones [emerging],” Vandegrift said, “is not
necessarily as painless as people like to think.”

Mike Mendelson, a learner experience designer for NVIDIA, is a different kind of educator than
Nahrstedt. He works with developers who want to learn more about AI and apply that knowledge
to their businesses.

“If they understand what the technology is capable of and they understand the domain very well,
they start to make connections and say, ‘Maybe this is an AI problem, maybe that’s an AI
problem,’” he said. “That’s more often the case than ‘I have a specific problem I want to solve.’”

THE NEAR FUTURE OF AI

In Mendelson’s view, some of the most intriguing AI research and experimentation that will
have near-future ramifications is happening in two areas: “reinforcement” learning, which deals
in rewards and punishment rather than labeled data; and generative adversarial networks (GAN
for short) that allow computer algorithms to create rather than merely assess by pitting two nets
against each other. The former is exemplified by the prowess of Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo
Zero, the latter by original image or audio generation that’s based on learning about a certain
subject like celebrities or a particular type of music.

On a far grander scale, AI is poised to have a major effect on sustainability, climate change and
environmental issues. Ideally and partly through the use of sophisticated sensors, cities will
become less congested, less polluted and generally more livable.

“Once you predict something, you can prescribe certain policies and rules,” Nahrstedt said. Such
as sensors on cars that send data about traffic conditions could predict potential problems and
optimize the flow of cars. “This is not yet perfected by any means,” she said. “It’s just in its
infancy. But years down the road, it will play a really big role.”

AI AND PRIVACY RISKS

Of course, much has been made of the fact that AI’s reliance on big data is already impacting
privacy in a major way. Look no further than Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook shenanigans or
Amazon’s Alexa eavesdropping, two among many examples of tech gone wild. Without proper
regulations and self-imposed limitations, critics argue, the situation will get even worse. In
2015, Apple CEO Tim Cook derided competitors Google and Meta for greed-driven data mining.

“They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it,” he said in
a 2015 speech. “We think that’s wrong.”

Later, during a talk in Brussels, Belgium, Cook expounded on his concern.

“Advancing AI by collecting huge personal profiles is laziness, not efficiency,” he said. “For
artificial intelligence to be truly smart, it must respect human values, including privacy. If we get
this wrong, the dangers are profound.”

Plenty of others agree. In a 2018 paper published by UK-based human rights and privacy groups
Article 19 and Privacy International, anxiety about AI is reserved for its everyday functions
rather than a cataclysmic shift like the advent of robot overlords.

“If implemented responsibly, AI can benefit society,” the authors wrote. “However, as is the case
with most emerging technology, there is a real risk that commercial and state use has a
detrimental impact on human rights.”

The authors concede that the collection of large amounts of data can be used for trying to predict
future behavior in benign ways, like spam filters and recommendation engines. But there’s also a
real threat that it will negatively impact personal privacy and the right to freedom from
discrimination.

Preparing for the Future of AI

THE POSSIBILITIES OF ARTIFICIAL GENERAL INTELLIGENCE

Speaking at London’s Westminster Abbey in late 2018, internationally renowned AI expert

Stuart Russell joked (or not) about his “formal agreement with journalists that I won’t talk to
them unless they agree not to put a Terminator robot in the article.”

His quip revealed an obvious contempt for Hollywood representations of far-future AI, which
tend toward the overwrought and apocalyptic. What Russell referred to as “human-level AI,”
also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), has long been fodder for fantasy. But the
chances of its being realized anytime soon, or at all, are pretty slim.

“There are still major breakthroughs that have to happen before we reach anything that resembles
human-level AI,” Russell explained.

Russel also pointed out that AI is not currently equipped to fully understand language. This
shows a distinct difference between humans and AI at the present moment: Humans can translate
machine language and understand it, but AI can’t do the same for human language. However, if
we reach a point where AI is able to understand our languages, AI systems would be able to read
and understand everything ever written.

“Once we have that capability, you could then query all of human knowledge and it would be
able to synthesize and integrate and answer questions that no human being has ever been able to
answer,” Russell added, “because they haven’t read and been able to put together and join the
dots between things that have remained separate throughout history.”

This offers us a lot to think about. On the subject of which, emulating the human brain is
exceedingly difficult and yet another reason for AGI’s still-hypothetical future. Longtime
University of Michigan engineering and computer science professor John Laird has conducted
research in the field for several decades.

“The goal has always been to try to build what we call the cognitive architecture, what we think
is innate to an intelligence system,” he says of work that’s largely inspired by human
psychology. “One of the things we know, for example, is the human brain is not really just a
homogenous set of neurons. There’s a real structure in terms of different components, some of
which are associated with knowledge about how to do things in the world.”

That’s called procedural memory. Then there’s knowledge based on general facts, a.k.a.
semantic memory, as well as knowledge about previous experiences (or personal facts) which is
called episodic memory. One of the projects at Laird’s lab involves using natural language
instructions to teach a robot simple games like Tic-Tac-Toe and puzzles. Those instructions
typically involve a description of the goal, a rundown of legal moves and failure situations. The
robot internalizes those directives and uses them to plan its actions. As ever, though,
breakthroughs are slow to come — slower, anyway, than Laird and his fellow researchers would
like.

“Every time we make progress,” he says, “we also get a new appreciation for how hard it is.”

IS AGI A THREAT TO HUMANITY?

More than a few leading AI figures subscribe (some more hyperbolically than others) to a
nightmare scenario that involves what’s known as “singularity,” whereby superintelligent
machines take over and permanently alter human existence through enslavement or eradication.

The late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking famously postulated that if AI itself begins
designing better AI than human programmers, the result could be “machines whose intelligence
exceeds ours by more than ours exceeds that of snails.” Elon Musk believes and has warned that
AGI is humanity’s biggest existential threat. Efforts to bring it about, he has said, are like
“summoning the demon.” He has even expressed concern that his pal, Google co-founder Larry
Page could accidentally shepherd something “evil” into existence despite his best intentions.

Even Gyongyosi rules nothing out. He’s no alarmist when it comes to AI predictions, but at some
point, he says, humans will no longer need to train systems; they’ll learn and evolve on their
own.
 “Currently, computers can handle a little more than 10,000 words,” he said. “So, a few million
neurons. But human brains have billions of neurons that are connected in a very intriguing and
complex way, and the current state-of-the-art [technology] is just straightforward connections
following very easy patterns. So going from a few million neurons to billions of neurons with
current hardware and software technologies — I don’t see that happening.”

HOW WILL WE USE AGI?

Klabjan also puts little stock in extreme scenarios — the type involving, say, murderous cyborgs
that turn the earth into a smoldering hellscape. He’s much more concerned with machines — war
robots, for instance — being fed faulty “incentives” by nefarious humans. As MIT physics
professors and leading AI researcher Max Tegmark put it in a 2018 TED Talk, “The real threat
from AI isn’t malice, like in silly Hollywood movies, but competence — AI accomplishing goals

What Laird worries most about isn’t evil AI, per se, but “evil humans using AI as a sort of false
force multiplier” for things like bank robbery and credit card fraud, among many other crimes.
And so, while he’s often frustrated with the pace of progress, AI’s slow burn may actually be a
blessing.

“Time to understand what we’re creating and how we’re going to incorporate it into society,”
Laird said, “might be exactly what we need.”

But no one knows for sure.

“There are several major breakthroughs that have to occur, and those could come very quickly,”
Russell said during his Westminster talk. Referencing the rapid transformational effect of nuclear
fission (atom splitting) by British physicist Ernest Rutherford in 1917, he added, “It’s very, very
hard to predict when these conceptual breakthroughs are going to happen.”

But whenever they do, if they do, he emphasized the importance of preparation. That means
starting or continuing discussions about the ethical use of AGI and whether it should be
regulated. That means working to eliminate data bias, which has a corrupting effect on
algorithms and is currently a fat fly in the AI ointment. That means working to invent and
augment security measures capable of keeping the technology in check. And it means having the
humility to realize that just because we can doesn’t mean we should.

“Most AGI researchers expect AGI within decades, and if we just bumble into this unprepared, it
will probably be the biggest mistake in human history. It could enable brutal global dictatorship
with unprecedented inequality, surveillance, suffering and maybe even human extinction,”
Tegmark said in his TED Talk. “But if we steer carefully, we could end up in a fantastic future
where everybody’s better off — the poor are richer, the rich are richer, everybody’s healthy and
free to live out their dreams.