What is the future of Artificial Intelligence?

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Even six years ago, people were seeing Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a “pipe dream”, stating for AI to become a dominant force and playing a major role may not be possible – soon. But now, just in 2023, we can comfortably say, by 2030, AI applications will aid and even replace human professionals in various sphere of life, while robots will be able to perform tasks that could not be automated even one decade ago. By the end of this century, Artificial Intelligence will take over almost every field – including healthcare sector and may one day consign war, poverty, disease, and even death to the past.

According to Robert Fay and Wallace Trenholm, “Artificial intelligence (AI) is truly a revolutionary feat of computer science, set to become a core component of all modern software over the coming years and decades. This presents a threat but also an opportunity. AI will be deployed to augment both defensive and offensive cyber operations. Additionally, new means of cyber-attack will be invented to take advantage of the particular weaknesses of AI technology. Finally, the importance of data will be amplified by AI’s appetite for large amounts of training data, redefining how we must think about data protection. Prudent governance at the global level will be essential to ensure that this era-defining technology will bring about broadly shared safety and prosperity”.

The further wrote: “AI will not only augment existing strategies for offence and defense, but also open new fronts in the battle for cyber security as malicious actors seek ways to exploit the technology’s particular weaknesses (ibid., 17). One novel avenue of attack that hostile actors may use is “data poisoning.” Since AI uses data to learn, hostile actors could tamper with the data set used to train the AI in order to make it do as they please.

““Adversarial examples” could provide another new form of attack. Analogous to optical illusions, adversarial examples consist of modifying an AI’s input data in a way that would likely be undetectable to a human, but is calculated to cause the AI to misclassify the input in a certain way. In one widely speculated scenario, a stop sign could be subtly altered to make the AI system controlling an autonomous car misidentify it as a yield sign, with potentially deadly results”.

In an August 8, 2022 article in built in, Mike Thomas wrote: “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”.

He further wrote: “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 US 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. We may be in the eternal spring of AI”, former Google Brain leader and Baidu chief scientist Andrew Ng told ZDNet.

In February 16, 2023, the World Economic Forum republished an article from ‘Our World in Data’ which said:

Artificial intelligence (AI) that surpasses our own intelligence sounds like the stuff from science-fiction books or films. What do experts in the field of AI research think about such scenarios? Do they dismiss these ideas as fantasy, or are they taking such prospects seriously?

A human-level AI would be a machine, or a network of machines, capable of carrying out the same range of tasks that we humans are capable of. It would be a machine that is “able to learn to do anything that a human can do”, as Norvig and Russell put it in their textbook on AI.

It would be able to choose actions that allow the machine to achieve its goals and then carry out those actions. It would be able to do the work of a translator, a doctor, an illustrator, a teacher, a therapist, a driver, or the work of an investor.

In recent years, several research teams contacted AI experts and asked them about their expectations for the future of machine intelligence. Such expert surveys are one of the pieces of information that we can rely on to form an idea of what the future of AI might look like.

The article further said, “experts were asked when they believe there is a 50 percent chance that human-level AI exists. Human-level AI was defined as unaided machines being able to accomplish every task better and more cheaply than human workers, where half of the experts gave a date before 2061, and 90 percent gave a date within the next 100 years”.

In my opinion, it won’t take another 50 years for Artificial Intelligence to even have far-better capability of humans.

Impact of Artificial Intelligence in the media

In most of the country in the world, journalism already is joining AI, and will continue to benefit from it. According to experts, news organizations like Associated Press, Reuters and comparatively smaller syndication service such as ‘Project Syndicate’ use Automated Insights that produces thousands of earning reports and feature stories every year. But generative AI writing tools such as ChatGPT may soon become a much convenient choice to the newspaper and media industry, where with the use of Artificial Intelligence, they can produce dozens of reports every day, which can significantly reduce their dependence of humans. At the same time, by using AI-powered ChatGPT, for example, standard of contents of each of the newspapers would significantly improve – both in linguistic and grammatical factors.

After ten years from now, an opinion editorial in The New York Times or The Guardian for example, shall not have any qualitative difference with similar contents published in a small newspaper like Blitz. Once that starts happening, large media outlets in the world will be facing tremendous odds especially in earning from paid subscription, as none would be interested in paying for reading a content in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Times of India, Hindustan Times and those online editions of newspapers running under paid subscription, when the same reader can get access to contents of similar standard on any online edition, that is free to all. Once that happens, it may ultimately result in demise of paid subscription.

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