Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humans

Artificial Intelligence is in many ways reshaping our tools and human-based methods, from the medical field to everyday gadgets and entertainment, to outer space. Humans are relying on AI more and more every day.

Being one born in the 21st century it’s becoming fairly obligatory to have at least a basic understanding or how AI functions, how it is based to replace more "traditional" methods, and how it’s implemented within your field of work. We are understanding AI even more than ever and making advancements every day consequently making it one of the most important technological innovations of our lifetime, having more money poured in investments, researching AI, and machine learning than ever.

Nevertheless, we must understand that its rapid growth, is concerning! while we humans are taking our hands off the wheel and letting “code” takeover, we should take into account that we might not be able to take our control back. One of the main -and most important people- in this area of science, and owner of the most influential motor, and space exploration
companies, Elon Musk, is also one of the advocates of regulating machines while we humanise them; as he has always been warning of how machines are going to become conscious, and how there’s going to be an uprising soon where robots are going to take over.

“we ought to have a government committee that starts
off with insight, gaining insight. Spends a year or two gaining insight about AI or other technologies that are maybe dangerous, but especially AI.”

(Elon Musk, Feb 18, 2020)

However, we can’t just exclude AI yet, for how it has been vastly changing our lives, but not just that, AI might’ve been extending it. One of the major roles it has to play is the Medical field, where machine learning (an implementation of AI) has been helping predict the medical future by using the medical history of a person’s family, one of those people who might’ve had their life saved by AI is the one and only Angelina Jolie, the actor’s doctors estimated that she has an 87 percent risk of having breast cancer and 50 percent of having ovarian cancer; so the average was almost 65 percent and all that was done using a dataset the doctors made whilst taking into consideration her family history with the diseases, that might’ve reduced the fatality of her case significantly.

“I hope that other women can benefit from my experience. Cancer is still a word that strikes fear into people’s hearts, producing a deep sense of powerlessness. But today it is possible to find out through a blood test whether you are highly susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer.”

(Angelina Jolie, Actress, Filmmaker, humanitarian, May 14, 2013)

I’ve had the chance to be a part of the development of a similar AI, where an instructor in my university gave me a dataset of medical histories that belonged to possible diabetes patients, and I was asked to devise a
percentage to each one using Microsoft Azure Machine Learning studio. I can confidently say that Machine Learning is going to play a major role in our development as a species, and the way we integrate our health system.

While AI is one of our most admirable inventions, that will be detrimental to our advancement, it’s not something we can brush off as nothing can go wrong. With its exponential growth, it’s not that hard to see a point where machines can become self-aware and we don’t understand yet what motives “they” will decide to adopt.

In conclusion:

AI shouldn’t be minimised for what it represents, but rather be
recognised for what it could potentially become. regulation should be set,
moderate supervision has to be obligatory; for this incredible innovation to be humanity’s best, not it’s doom.