What are the advantages of artificial intelligence?

 Artificial Intelligence is a field that is seeing rapid development and has an impact on our day to day life. Before looking into its advantages, first let’s understand what an AI is?

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence in simple terms, is nothing but the simulation of human intelligence done by machines that are programmed by us. The machines need to learn how to reason and do some self-correction as needed along the way.

Advantages of Artificial Intelligence:

Using AI for a task has improved our life drastically. Let’s look at some of its advantages:

1) Reduction in Human Error

The phrase “human error” was born because humans make mistakes from time to time. Computers, however, do not make these mistakes if they are programmed properly. With Artificial intelligence, the decisions are taken from the previously gathered information applying a certain set of algorithms. So errors are reduced and the chance of reaching accuracy with a greater degree of precision is a possibility.

Example: In Weather Forecasting using AI they have reduced the majority of human error.

2) Takes risks instead of Humans

This is one of the biggest advantages of Artificial intelligence. We can overcome many risky limitations of humans by developing an AI Robot which in turn can do the risky things for us. Let it be going to mars, defuse a bomb, explore the deepest parts of oceans, mining for coal and oil, it can be used effectively in any kind of natural or man-made disasters.

Example: Have you heard about the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion in Ukraine? At that time there were no AI-powered robots that can help us to minimize the effect of radiation by controlling the fire in early stages, as any human went close to the core was dead in a matter of minutes. They eventually poured sand and boron from helicopters from a mere distance.

AI Robots can be used in situations where human intervention can be hazardous.

3) Available 24×7

An Average human will work for 4-6 hours a day excluding the breaks. Humans are built in such a way to get some time out for refreshing themselves and get ready for a new day of work and they even have weekly off to stay intact with their work-life and personal life. But using AI we can make machines work 24×7 without any breaks and they don’t even get bored, unlike humans.

Example: Educational Institutes and Helpline centers are getting many queries and issues which can be handled effectively using AI.

4) Digital Assistance

Some of the highly advanced organizations use digital assistants to interact with users which saves the need for human resources. The digital assistant also used in many websites to provide things that users want. We can chat with them about what we are looking for. Some chatbots are designed in such a way that it becomes hard to determine that we’re chatting with a chatbot or a human being.

Example: We all know that organizations have a customer support team that needs to clarify the doubts and queries of the customers. Using AI the organizations can set up a Voicebot or Chatbot which can help customers with all their queries. We can see many organizations already started using them on their websites and mobile applications.

5) Daily Applications

Daily applications such as Apple’s Siri, Window’s Cortana, Google’s OK Google are frequently used in our daily routine whether it is for searching a location, taking a selfie, making a phone call, replying to a mail and many more.

Example: Around 20 years ago, when we are planning to go somewhere we used to ask a person who already went there for the directions. But now all we have to do is say “OK Google where is Visakhapatnam”. It will show you Visakhapatnam’s location on google map and the best path between you and Visakhapatnam.

Artificial intelligence would not need any sleep. This would be an advantage because it would not be interrupted from its tasks for sleep, as well as other issues that plague biological minds like restroom breaks and eating.

Unemotional consideration of problems. While an artificial mind could theoretically have emotions, it would be better for performance if it were programmed for unemotional reasoning. When people make decisions, sometimes those decisions are based on emotion rather than logic. This is not always the best way to make decisions.

Easier copying. Once an artificial mind is trained in a task, that mind can then be copied very easily, compared to the training of multiple people for the same task.

There are some disadvantages to the artificial mind as well ...

Limited sensory input. Compared to a biological mind, an artificial mind is only capable of taking in a small amount of information. This is because of the need for individual input devices. The most important input that we humans take in is the condition of our bodies. Because we feel what is going on with our own bodies, we can maintain them much more efficiently than an artificial mind. At this point, it is unclear whether that would be possible with a computer system.

Which leads to another disadvantage ...

The inability to heal. Biological systems can heal with time and treatment. For minor conditions, most biological systems can continue normally with only a small drop in performance. Most computer systems, on the other hand, often need to be shut down for maintenance.

These are only some basic advantages and disadvantages without getting too technical. I am sure that other answers will vary greatly from mine, but I take an unusual approach to my research.

AI is a phenomenal tool for assisting humans with repetitive and mundane tasks. Especially pattern recognition. I’ll give some examples from within healthcare, since that is where I am most familiar with the technology. Two fields that come to mind are pathology and radiology. These medical specialties rely on a human to do the pattern recognition on hundreds of images a day. Most have normal and abnormal findings on the images and sometimes the abnormal findings are difficult to spot. AI can very effectively look through the images and call attention to the abnormal areas that really need the physician’s attention. AI does not replace the human; it augments the abilities of the human. With AI, there should be less errors and improved efficiency in the process of reading all these images.

Another example I saw at a recent health conference around AI is to have the machine look over a patient’s medical record to suggest an underlying diagnosis where it was not previously considered. The company told a story of where a little girl was hospitalized numerous times for a respiratory condition that the doctors could not understand. AI was used to extract information from all the hospital records and suggest a diagnosis, a task that a human would have found tedious. A doctor still made the final diagnosis, but the mundane task of searching for keywords in thousands of pages of hospital records is done by AI.

A final example is to have the AI read all the medical literature on a topic and be a subject matter expert for the specialist. This is what IBMs Watson is supposed to do for oncologists. It isn’t possible for a health professional to read about all the studies that come out in their field every year, but Watson can do it without difficulty. It can then suggest the latest and greatest treatment based on that literature.

So the simple answer to your question is that AI makes human lives better by taking care of processes that do not require higher level thinking. I’m sure that applies to more industries than just healthcare.