Artificial Intelligence: Benefits and Dangers
Brooklynne Stokes
ENG 105
Macy McDonald
26 April 2018
Artificial intelligence is a very huge milestone of the present. AI’s are systems that can be used to perform tasks with intelligence like visual perception, speech recognition, decision making, and translating different languages which can improve our lives in many ways. Artificial intelligence can especially effect university or college students in some large ways. AI in universities are going to be used for research and learning and will be very helpful for the students involved with it (Dodgson). If universities don’t end up using the artificial intelligence then it could decrease the relevance of the school and decreased the amount of people who go to it. The AI will help the students with the way they will learn and will improve the education system of that school. It’s thought that AIs and machine learning will improve the process of scientific discovery (Dodgson). The machine learning also helps with facilitating the different ideas and figuring out the problems. The AI will help to strengthen and deepen intelligence in different fields of knowledge as well. The use of AI can also help to connect university student research like medical research with clinical practices (Dodgson).AI can be very beneficial for universities and their students.
Artificial intelligence has already been shown to be changing our brains in a different way. Having a lot of interactions with new forms of technology can seriously change and affect your brain. Artificial intelligence can especially change information we remember like things that make us very happy (“This Is”). It can better or worsen the memory of it. If the technology that stores the happy memories gets damaged or lost then you’ve completely lost the memory because you chose to store it in your iPhone or laptop instead of having it in your mind. But if the technology is completely fine then you have more room in your memory for other things and the AI will remember it for you for as long as you have it. This is exactly the reason you should depend on the artificial intelligence to keep the memory or information because you could look at it whenever you want or watch it whenever you want if it’s a picture or a video like on Snapchat or Instagram or just in your camera roll. Sometimes if you are trying to remember a specific memory you don’t remember it the way it actually happened and you can end up forgetting parts or adding things that never happened. Something else that is an effect of AI is the Google Effect. The definition of the Google Effect is basically forgetting information because you can easily look it up online instead of learning it and memorizing it. This effect can be positive because what if all your looking up is like, ‘What is the name of the dog from Garfield?’ that information isn’t really necessary to remember unless you are doing an entire project on the world of Garfield or something. In this case I feel like the Google Effect isn’t really relevant because of how irrelevant the information is. The Google Effect could also be not applicable though because if you are really googling an answer to a question for like a study guide for a college exam then you will most likely try to memorize the answer because it could appear on your exam later on. Another effect of artificial intelligence is that people completely rely on GPS or Google Maps nowadays to get where they need to go which can weaken some parts of the brain and reduce brain activity (“This Is”). This is a fairly negative effect but using GPS and Google Maps is helping you get from place to place without getting lost. Some people have the worst sense of direction in the world and need GPS or Google Maps to help them get somewhere. And you might use Google Maps quite a bit in your life. Google Maps can even tell you how much traffic you will run into on some routes and how long it will take approximately to get to the place you’re going.
Artificial intelligence can be a positive effect on society and the world. Artificial intelligence is more intelligent than humans and can’t go beyond tasks it was made to perform for the most part (Ardi). For the task it was made to perform, it goes quicker than if a human only did the task, for example for tasks like accounting, banking, or paying bills (“Is Artificial”). This could be helpful for college students especially who live off campus in like an apartment. Artificial intelligence can help them to pay their bills so they don’t have to take up so much time to do it and have more time throughout their day to study or do other things like homework. Artificial intelligence is even impacting farming in a really positive way. FarmLogs is an app that helps farmers monitor fields, know the weather pattern, and have insight about soil using satellite imagery to calculate irregular plant growth (“Three”). It’s making farmer’s jobs a lot easier and quicker. Artificial intelligence can also help to make the diagnosis and treatment process of cancer faster (“Three”). It can happen in 24 hours with the help of AI because of the high-performance machines helping to diagnose it. The positive effects of artificial intelligence are helping all parts of the society and can be used for good everywhere if in the right hands.
There are a lot of positive effects of artificial intelligence, but with the positive there are also a lot of negative ones. AI’s are learning to read our minds and are starting to affect our ability to think in some ways. Relying on artificial intelligence like Siri and GPS can affect your brain activity. It can make it a lot worse at times. You don’t have to think about things as much because if you don’t know the answer to something or any information about it, you can just Google it or ask Siri. And if it’s important like for an exam and you didn’t even recognize it and you have to Google the answer or ask Siri there’s still a huge chance you might not even remember it no matter how important it is. People rely more on AI than on their own brains because it’s easier to do that than to keep everything stored in your brain which is actually really negative. If you think about the AI you use every day like social media, a lot of people store a lot of memories on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat. You are keeping things on those social networking sites that could have been kept in your head. Or online shopping like on Amazon, it shows you recommendations and knows what you would like based on old purchases which is like the website knows you more and more with each purchase which can be negative the more you think about it, it’s kind of creepy. AI’s are also learning to read our minds which can be seen as really bad and pretty creepy because how does that even happen? I feel like it wouldn’t be really comforting having something reading my mind. In a study, three women watched a few random video clips and with the help of neural signals an AI could predict 50% of what the woman was watching after she was done watching it (Hutson). That’s slightly scary because it could predict about half of what was watched. The artificial intelligence could make an image of what they had watched, it reconstructed a picture of it. AI’s are improving and upgrading very fast which can be very dangerous for people in the world.
Artificial intelligence can severely change your way of thinking with the way it is programmed. If AI is programmed to do something destructive, it can take any form or way to get to that goal which can end in danger at some point. If the AI ends up with the wrong people and they program it to kill someone or do something else just as horrible, it can basically do whatever it wants to finish the goal and it can be hard to take the AI off that goal or to cancel it or just change it (“Benefits”). When you give an AI a goal it has to be very specific. You have to make sure it knows what to do specifically to get it done or it’ll just wander off and do something else. AI are more intelligent than humans and it can figure out how to do things better than people (“Benefits”). AI is so intelligent it can end up killing someone who is a target of the person who set it up. Artificial intelligence as said before does whatever it needs to, to get to the goal which can be pretty brutal depending on the goal and what it needs to get through to get to it.
What do you think about the way artificial intelligence has impacted the world? Do you think it will get better or worse from here? Do you think it’ll take over the world eventually? Think about what life is like with the artificial intelligence we have today like the iPhone or a virtual reality headset or a drone. Do you think they are improvements or do you think eventually they could ruin the world? Think about the ways the world could really change with the quick upgrading AI and the positive and negative points of them.
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Dodgson, Mark, et al. “Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Universities. Here's How.” World Economic Forum,www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/08/artificial-intelligence-will-transform-universities-here-s-how/. Accessed 22 April 2018.
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