15th April, 2022
By Moshood Yahaya
The contemporary world has experienced enormous technological growth that was rather unthinkable in the past few decades. Certainly, the Fourth industrial revolution (Digitization of business and industrial practices) has become more feasible with the astronomical increase in amount of accessible data and the availability of fast paced potential (of computing systems) in providing optimum business decisions/solutions. Past trends suggests that industrial evolutions are not only known for the development and growth (brought about by the technological changes and innovation) they bring to our societies, but also characterised by the negative inherent impacts. The past industry revolutions (the mechanisation, the use of electrical energy and the electronics and automation revolutions) all brought about changes (and in some cases, disappearance, and reduced need for personnel) to some jobs and professions, carbon emission and global warming, amongst other unwanted impacts. Therefore, with Majority of industries having petabytes of data at their disposal, alongside the hugely accessible computing power in recent years, the need and impact of artificial intelligence is ever increase, and it is worth exploring the true status of this impact, and the challenges posed to humans and the immediate society.
Artificial intelligence is typically described as the capacity of a computing system to accurately read external input, learn from it, and use what it has learned to achieve specified objectives and tasks through flexible adaptation”. Simply put, AI technology simulates human intelligence in machines. Machines are taught, through complex algorithms, to be intelligent so as to carry out actions as humans would. Going by historical trends in its application, Artificial Intelligence has most certainly come a long way since the first introduction in the 1950s, on the introduction of this hugely impactful and wonderful technology. Early innovations with AI fascinated the world, through the unprecedented creation of applications that could play checkers, amongst other things. Contemporary deployment of the technology has heralded huge technological innovations that would be best related to a Sci-fi movie, in the past.
The rapid growth in artificial intelligence as ensured that every decade record ground-breaking innovative advancement. Numerous AI models, unironically referred to as digital humans has been trained by experts, with vast amounts of data to carry out major tasks faster and arguably better than humans. AI applications are now found in both the public and private sectors, through hugely impactful deployments in law enforcement, health care, immigration, and education, to name a few. Additionally, businesses are resorting to the automation of the workplaces with cutting-edge technology such as self-driving cars, autonomous freight trucks, artificially intelligent hedge funds, self-approving mortgages, robotics, legal, autonomous killing devices and the most recent Generative Artificial Intelligence technologies, allowing humans to fully deploy their expertise towards more brain demanding activities. The huge impact has led to a hugely booming industry, with highly unprecedented demand for AI skillset, tools, and applications. Fortune Business Insights estimates that the value of the global AI industry will reach USD 1394.30 billion in 2029, growing at a CAGR of 20.1% from 2022 to 2029. The industry is growing at a healthy pace, and the notable trends this decade has witnessed will be highlighted in this article.
Aiming at specific AI innovation is ever so beneficial to widen the knowledge scope of any reader and show the achievable potential of AI. For example, the hugely celebrated Generative AI is a product of this century and remained ever so popular since 2014 and has been an instant hit since then. Startups are building entire projects on the Generative AI model and securing funding amidst the current economic climate of technology. However, with its enormous benefit, the capabilities of Generative AI in the content space pose a real threat to content writers and even educational institutions, as plagiarism and malpractice are a genuine concern. This AI technology has the unimaginable potential to craft full-length articles and academic essays and answer examination questions. In 2021 Mckinsey published a two years study that revealed that AI technology could replace 30% of the world’s current workforce. The conversation around GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), especially third generation, often revolves around how it will overhaul the use for content writers, copywriters, and the like. While majority of experts argue that it will only supplement, with assertions that writers who utilises the AI capabilities will be ahead of the writer that does not. Regardless of the ongoing debate, businesses, especially small businesses, are now opting to use AI tech like CopyAI and FlairAI to craft branded content and copy for marketing. The possibility of what future generation models could bring is both fascinating and frightening.
Generative AI algorithms are not just going viral in the content world; it is also amusing us with AI-generated images. DALL-E is currently the poster child for text- to-image technology. This is also the season of arguably the biggest AI innovation yet, the Generative Adversarial Networks’ (GANs algorithm). GANs is a deep learning algorithm that allows computer model to learn so from real data, that it can imitate and general data sets to similar quality as the original. This is originally for the purpose of data synthesising and anonymisation. However, general use of this technology has led to the malicious deployment is production of deepfake images of famous personalities. Deep Fake videos of celebrities like Tom Cruise or Obama have millions of views on TikTok, for instance. This has raised a lot of conversation and legal developments because of its ability to be used by threat actors for impersonation and fraud. The World Intellectual Property Organization (“WIPO”) published the “Draft Issues Paper On Intellectual Property Policy And Artificial Intelligence” in December 2019 to address some of these issues. The US government is one of the world governments tackling this issue as a criminal matter. It implemented the Identifying Outputs of Generative Adversarial Networks Act in 2020 and the National Defense Authorization Act. The 2021 NDAA requires the Department of Homeland Security to monitor such activities and submit an annual report on deep fakes and similar content. Generative AI is in every industry this decade; for instance, Uberduck can create Audio clips with celebrity music, and AmperMusic can be used to create songs with the voices of celebrities.
Despite the huge impact and challenges relating to the application of AI as mentioned above, the shocking discovery is that AI is still said to be at its weak stage, by experts. The narrow (weak) AI is said to be one that is only applied to specific areas, and the inability to solve problems in areas other than which it was trained for. AI has been touted to be approaching the Artificial General Intelligence (strong AI) phase, a prediction that has always been deferred since the introduction of AI. The strong AI is expected to be applicable to numerous areas and would poses the ability to reason, think, display emotion and solve problems like humans, while outperforming humans in several areas. The big question is, what negativity will this introduce and are we prepared for it emergence. Needless to mention the Artificial Super Intelligence stage (conscious AI), which is expected to succeed the yet to be actualised strong AI.
This begs for huge analysis of the potential challenges that the continuous advancement in AI can bring about and explore ways to mitigate them. Admittedly, we wouldn’t want to imagine a world without AI, as we will be back driving without google map, business automations will be totally lost, and the hardship of sourcing information without google map is too much to imagine. Therefore, we should plan a world with huge control on how AI is deployed, by championing ethical use of AI, and driving government involvement in enacting relevant laws, regulations and conduct codes for the deployment and application of AI.
.