Artificial Intelligence has become much “cooler” and down-to-earth in the past years. The concept of A.I. was first made popular via books and movies where wickedly smart computers were stealing and cheating and changing the life of the people. Because, in those stories, the authors always made A.I. so much more intelligent and powerful than human beings. Think of HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odissey or Alicia Vikander’s Ava in Ex — Machina
The fact is that A.I. are not smarter than humans. They will never be, at least in the near future. Artificial Intelligence are just so much better than us at doing what they are trained to: reading data, for example. When fed a ton of data, A.I. can make sense of them and turn them into useful insights.
On one hand, clearly AI is going to radically transform how work is done, who does it and what are the outcomes. But you shouldn’t think of artificial intelligence implementations as a substitute for humans. Machines “simply” augment our intelligence.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning enhance what human workers are able to do. With AI’s incredible analytical speed and scalability buttressing people’s creativity, sociability, and understanding, people are freed to focus on higher-level tasks that take advantage of uniquely human strengths.
Think of IOT — Internet of Things — and A.I. in farming: thanks to the machine’s ability to forecast the weather changes and possible disasters, farmers have been able to adapt quickly and take action. Another example in this field is Waterfox, an app that uses A.I. to help farmers irrigate their fields more efficiently.
The point is: A.I. will never be as powerful, creative, smart, empathic as human being. But it will help humans become more creative, smart, empathic!
