11/2/23, 4:14 PM The Future of AI: How AI Is Changing the World | Built In

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The Future of AI: How Artificial

Intelligence Will Change the
World
AI is constantly changing our world. Here are just a few ways AI will influence our
lives.

Written by Mike Thomas

Image: Shutterstock

U P D AT E D BY REVIEWED BY
Jessica Powers | Mar 03, 2023 Sadrach Pierre

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I f it feels like the future of AI is a rapidly changing landscape, that’s because the
present innovations in the field of artificial intelligence are accelerating at such a
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blazing-fast pace that it’s tough to keep up.

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Indeed, artificial intelligence is shaping the future of humanity across nearly every
industry. It is already the main driver of emerging technologies like big data, robotics
and IoT — not to mention generative AI, with tools like ChatGPT and AI art generators
garnering mainstream attention — and it will continue to act as a technological
innovator for the foreseeable future.

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.

It seems likely that AI is going to (continue to) change the world. But how, exactly?

MORE ON THE FUTURE OF AI

Can AI Make Art More Human?

The Evolution of AI
AI’s influence on technology is due in part because of how it impacts computing.
Through AI, computers have the ability to harness massive amounts of data and use
their learned intelligence to make optimal decisions and discoveries in fractions of the
time that it would take humans.

AI has come a long way since 1951, when the first documented success of an AI
computer program was written by Christopher Strachey, whose checkers program
completed a whole game on the Ferranti Mark I computer at the University of
Manchester.

Since then, AI has been used to help sequence RNA for vaccines and model human
speech, technologies that rely on model- and algorithm-based machine learning and
increasingly focus on perception, reasoning and generalization. With innovations like

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these, AI has re-taken center stage like never before — and it won’t cede the spotlight
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anytime soon.

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What Industries Will AI Change?

There’s virtually no major industry that modern AI — more specifically, “narrow AI,”
which performs objective functions using data-trained models and often falls into the
categories of deep learning or machine learning — hasn’t already affected. That’s
especially true in the past few years, as data collection and analysis has ramped up
considerably thanks to robust IoT connectivity, the proliferation of connected devices
and ever-speedier computer processing.

“I think anybody making assumptions about the capabilities of intelligent software

capping out at some point are mistaken,” David Vandegrift, CTO and co-founder of the
customer relationship management firm 4Degrees, said.

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 U.S. 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,” former Google Brain leader and Baidu chief scientist Andrew Ng told ZDNet.
“We may be in the eternal spring of AI.”

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Some sectors are at the start of their AI journey, others are veteran travelers. Both
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have a long way to go. Regardless, the impact AI is having on our present day lives is
hard to ignore.
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AI IN TRANSPORTATION

Transportation is one industry that is certainly teed up to be drastically changed by AI.

Self-driving cars and AI travel planners are just a couple of facets of how we get from
point A to point B that will be influenced by AI. Even though autonomous vehicles are
far from perfect, they will one day ferry us from place to place.

AI IN MANUFACTURING

Manufacturing has been benefiting from AI for years. With AI-enabled robotic arms
and other manufacturing bots dating back to the 1960s and 1970s, the industry has
adapted well to the powers of AI. These industrial robots typically work alongside
humans to perform a limited range of tasks like assembly and stacking, and predictive
analysis sensors keep equipment running smoothly.

AI IN HEALTHCARE

It may seem unlikely, but AI healthcare is already changing the way humans interact
with medical providers. Thanks to its big data analysis capabilities, AI helps identify
diseases more quickly and accurately, speed up and streamline drug discovery and
even monitor patients through virtual nursing assistants.

AI IN EDUCATION

AI in education will change the way humans of all ages learn. AI’s use of machine
learning, natural language processing and facial recognition help digitize textbooks,
detect plagiarism and gauge the emotions of students to help determine who’s

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struggling or bored. Both presently and in the future, AI tailors the experience of
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learning to student’s individual needs.

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AI IN MEDIA

Journalism is harnessing AI too, and will continue to benefit from it. One example can
be seen in The Associated Press’ use of Automated Insights, which produces thousands
of earning reports stories per year. But as generative AI writing tools, such as
ChatGPT, enter the market, questions about their use in journalism abound.

AI IN CUSTOMER SERVICE

Most people dread getting a robo-call, but AI in customer service can provide the
industry with data-driven tools that bring meaningful insights to both the customer
and the provider. AI tools powering the customer service industry come in the form of
chatbots and virtual assistants.

Video: CrashCourse

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The Impact of AI on Society FOR EMPLOYERS

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HOW AI WILL CHANGE WORK

During a lecture at Northwestern University, AI expert Kai-Fu Lee championed AI

technology and its forthcoming impact while also noting its side effects and
limitations. Of the former, he warned:

“The bottom 90 percent, especially the bottom 50 percent of the

world in terms of income or education, will be badly hurt with job
displacement … The simple question to ask is, ‘How routine is a
job?’ And that is how likely [it is] a job will be replaced by AI,
because AI can, within the routine task, learn to optimize itself. And
the more quantitative, the more objective the job is—separating
things into bins, washing dishes, picking fruits and answering
customer service calls—those are very much scripted tasks that
are repetitive and routine in nature. In the matter of five, 10 or 15
years, they will be displaced by AI.”

In the warehouses of online giant and AI powerhouse Amazon, which buzz with more
than 100,000 robots, picking and packing functions are still performed by humans —
but that will change.

Lee’s opinion was echoed by Infosys president Mohit Joshi, who told the New York
Times, “People are looking to achieve very big numbers. Earlier they had incremental,
five to 10 percent goals in reducing their workforce. Now they’re saying, ‘Why can’t we
do it with one percent of the people we have?’”

On a more upbeat note, Lee stressed that today’s AI is useless in two significant ways:
it has no creativity and no capacity for compassion or love. Rather, it’s “a tool to
amplify human creativity.” His solution? Those with jobs that involve repetitive or
routine tasks must learn new skills so as not to be left by the wayside. Amazon even
offers its employees money to train for jobs at other companies.

“One of the absolute prerequisites for AI to be successful in many [areas] is that we

invest tremendously in education to retrain people for new jobs,” said Klara Nahrstedt,
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a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and

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director of the school’s Coordinated Science Laboratory.

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concerned ARTICLES
that’s not SALARIES
happening widely COURSES
or often enough. Marc Gyongyosi, MY ITEMS

founder of Onetrack.AI, is even more specific.

“People need to learn about programming like they learn a new language,” he said.
“And they need to do that as early as possible because it really is the future. In the
future, if you don’t know coding, you don’t know programming, it’s only going to get
more difficult.”

While many of those who are forced out of jobs by technology will find new ones,
Vandegrift said, that won’t happen overnight. As with America’s transition from an
agricultural to an industrial economy during the Industrial Revolution, which played a
big role in causing the Great Depression, people eventually got back on their feet. The
short-term impact, however, was massive.

“The transition between jobs going away and new ones [emerging],” Vandegrift said,
“is not necessarily as painless as people like to think.”

Mike Mendelson, a learner experience designer for NVIDIA, is a different kind of

educator than Nahrstedt. He works with developers who want to learn more about AI
and apply that knowledge to their businesses.

“If they understand what the technology is capable of and they understand the domain
very well, they start to make connections and say, ‘Maybe this is an AI problem, maybe
that’s an AI problem,’” he said. “That’s more often the case than ‘I have a specific
problem I want to solve.’”

MORE ON AI

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THE NEAR FUTURE OF AI

In Mendelson’s view, some of the most intriguing AI research and experimentation

that will have near-future ramifications is happening in two areas: “reinforcement”

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learning, which deals in rewards and punishment rather than labeled data; and
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generative adversarial networks (GAN for short) that allow computer algorithms to
create rather than merely assess by pitting two nets against each other. The former is
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exemplified by the prowess of Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo Zero, the latter by original
image or audio generation that’s based on learning about a certain subject like
celebrities or a particular type of music.

On a far grander scale, AI is poised to have a major effect on sustainability, climate

change and environmental issues. Ideally and partly through the use of sophisticated
sensors, cities will become less congested, less polluted and generally more livable.

“Once you predict something, you can prescribe certain policies and rules,” Nahrstedt
said. Such as sensors on cars that send data about traffic conditions could predict
potential problems and optimize the flow of cars. “This is not yet perfected by any
means,” she said. “It’s just in its infancy. But years down the road, it will play a really
big role.”

AI AND PRIVACY RISKS

Of course, much has been made of the fact that AI’s reliance on big data is already
impacting privacy in a major way. Look no further than Cambridge Analytica’s
Facebook shenanigans or Amazon’s Alexa eavesdropping, two among many examples
of tech gone wild. Without proper regulations and self-imposed limitations, critics
argue, the situation will get even worse. In 2015, Apple CEO Tim Cook derided
competitors Google and Meta for greed-driven data mining.

“They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it,” he
said in a 2015 speech. “We think that’s wrong.”

Later, during a talk in Brussels, Belgium, Cook expounded on his concern.

“Advancing AI by collecting huge personal profiles is laziness, not efficiency,” he said.

“For artificial intelligence to be truly smart, it must respect human values, including
privacy. If we get this wrong, the dangers are profound.”

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Plenty of others agree. In a 2018 paper published by UK-based human rights and
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privacy groups Article 19 and Privacy International, anxiety about AI is reserved for its
everyday functions rather than a cataclysmic shift like the advent of robot overlords.
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“If implemented responsibly, AI can benefit society,” the authors wrote. “However, as
is the case with most emerging technology, there is a real risk that commercial and
state use has a detrimental impact on human rights.”

The authors concede that the collection of large amounts of data can be used for trying
to predict future behavior in benign ways, like spam filters and recommendation
engines. But there’s also a real threat that it will negatively impact personal privacy
and the right to freedom from discrimination.

RELATED READING

Online Privacy: A Guide to How Your Personal Data Is Used

Preparing for the Future of AI

THE POSSIBILITIES OF ARTIFICIAL GENERAL INTELLIGENCE

Speaking at London’s Westminster Abbey in late 2018, internationally renowned AI

expert Stuart Russell joked (or not) about his “formal agreement with journalists that I
won’t talk to them unless they agree not to put a Terminator robot in the article.”

His quip revealed an obvious contempt for Hollywood representations of far-future AI,
which tend toward the overwrought and apocalyptic. What Russell referred to as
“human-level AI,” also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), has long been
fodder for fantasy. But the chances of its being realized anytime soon, or at all, are
pretty slim.

“There are still major breakthroughs that have to happen before we reach anything
that resembles human-level AI,” Russell explained.

Russel also pointed out that AI is not currently equipped to fully understand language.
This shows a distinct difference between humans and AI at the present moment:

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Humans can translate machine language and understand it, but AI can’t do the same
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for human language. However, if we reach a point where AI is able to understand our
languages, AI systems would be able to read and understand everything ever written.
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“Once we have that capability, you could then query all of human knowledge and it
would be able to synthesize and integrate and answer questions that no human being
has ever been able to answer,” Russell added, “because they haven’t read and been able
to put together and join the dots between things that have remained separate
throughout history.”

This offers us a lot to think about. On the subject of which, emulating the human brain
is exceedingly difficult and yet another reason for AGI’s still-hypothetical future.
Longtime University of Michigan engineering and computer science professor John
Laird has conducted research in the field for several decades.

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“The goal has always been to try to build what we call the cognitive architecture, what
we think is innate to an intelligence system,” he says of work that’s largely inspired by
human psychology. “One of the things we know, for example, is the human brain is not
really just a homogenous set of neurons. There’s a real structure in terms of different
components, some of which are associated with knowledge about how to do things in
the world.”

That’s called procedural memory. Then there’s knowledge based on general facts, a.k.a.
semantic memory, as well as knowledge about previous experiences (or personal facts)
which is called episodic memory. One of the projects at Laird’s lab involves using
natural language instructions to teach a robot simple games like Tic-Tac-Toe and
puzzles. Those instructions typically involve a description of the goal, a rundown of
legal moves and failure situations. The robot internalizes those directives and uses
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them to plan its actions. As ever, though, breakthroughs are slow to come — slower,
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anyway, than Laird and his fellow researchers would like.

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we make progress,” COURSES
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appreciation for how hard
it is.”

Video: Science Time

IS AGI A THREAT TO HUMANITY?

More than a few leading AI figures subscribe (some more hyperbolically than others)
to a nightmare scenario that involves what’s known as “singularity,” whereby
superintelligent machines take over and permanently alter human existence through
enslavement or eradication.

The late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking famously postulated that if AI itself
begins designing better AI than human programmers, the result could be “machines
whose intelligence exceeds ours by more than ours exceeds that of snails.” Elon Musk
believes and has warned that AGI is humanity’s biggest existential threat. Efforts to
bring it about, he has said, are like “summoning the demon.” He has even expressed
concern that his pal, Google co-founder Larry Page could accidentally shepherd
something “evil” into existence despite his best intentions.

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Even Gyongyosi rules nothing out. He’s no alarmist when it comes to AI predictions,
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but at some point, he says, humans will no longer need to train systems; they’ll learn
and evolve on their own.
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“I don’t think the methods we use currently in these areas will lead to machines that
decide to kill us,” Gyongyosi said. “I think that maybe five or 10 years from now, I’ll
have to reevaluate that statement because we’ll have different methods available and
different ways to go about these things.

While murderous machines may well remain fodder for fiction, many believe they’ll
supplant humans in various ways.

Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute published the results of an AI survey.

Titled “When Will AI Exceed Human Performance? Evidence from AI Experts,” it
contains estimates from 352 machine learning researchers about AI’s evolution in
years to come.

There were lots of optimists in this group. By 2026, a median number of respondents
said, machines will be capable of writing school essays; by 2027 self-driving trucks will
render drivers unnecessary; by 2031 AI will outperform humans in the retail sector; by
2049 AI could be the next Stephen King and by 2053 the next Charlie Teo. The slightly
jarring capper: By 2137, all human jobs will be automated. But what of humans
themselves? Sipping umbrella drinks served by droids, no doubt.

Diego Klabjan, a professor at Northwestern University and founding director of the

school’s Master of Science in Analytics program, counts himself an AGI skeptic.

“Currently, computers can handle a little more than 10,000 words,” he said. “So, a few
million neurons. But human brains have billions of neurons that are connected in a
very intriguing and complex way, and the current state-of-the-art [technology] is just
straightforward connections following very easy patterns. So going from a few million
neurons to billions of neurons with current hardware and software technologies — I
don’t see that happening.”

RECOMMENDED READING

7 Dangerous Risks of Artificial Intelligence

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HOW WILL WE USE AGI?

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Klabjan also puts little stock in extreme scenarios — the type involving, say, murderous
cyborgs that
JOBS turn the
COMPANIES earth into a smoldering
ARTICLES hellscape. He’s
SALARIES much more concernedMY ITEMS
COURSES

with machines — war robots, for instance — being fed faulty “incentives” by nefarious
humans. As MIT physics professors and leading AI researcher Max Tegmark put it in a
2018 TED Talk, “The real threat from AI isn’t malice, like in silly Hollywood movies,
but competence — AI accomplishing goals that just aren’t aligned with ours.”

That’s Laird’s take, too: “I definitely don’t see the scenario where something wakes up
and decides it wants to take over the world,” he said. “I think that’s science fiction and
not the way it’s going to play out.”

What Laird worries most about isn’t evil AI, per se, but “evil humans using AI as a sort
of false force multiplier” for things like bank robbery and credit card fraud, among
many other crimes. And so, while he’s often frustrated with the pace of progress, AI’s
slow burn may actually be a blessing.

“Time to understand what we’re creating and how we’re going to incorporate it into
society,” Laird said, “might be exactly what we need.”

But no one knows for sure.

“There are several major breakthroughs that have to occur, and those could come very
quickly,” Russell said during his Westminster talk. Referencing the rapid
transformational effect of nuclear fission (atom splitting) by British physicist Ernest
Rutherford in 1917, he added, “It’s very, very hard to predict when these conceptual
breakthroughs are going to happen.”

But whenever they do, if they do, he emphasized the importance of preparation. That
means starting or continuing discussions about the ethical use of AGI and whether it
should be regulated. That means working to eliminate data bias, which has a
corrupting effect on algorithms and is currently a fat fly in the AI ointment. That
means working to invent and augment security measures capable of keeping the
technology in check. And it means having the humility to realize that just because we
can doesn’t mean we should.

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“Most AGI researchers expect AGI within decades, and if we just bumble into this
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unprepared, it will probably be the biggest mistake in human history. It could enable
brutal global dictatorship with unprecedented inequality, surveillance, suffering and
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maybe even human extinction,” Tegmark said in his TED Talk. “But if we steer
carefully, we could end up in a fantastic future where everybody’s better off — the poor
are richer, the rich are richer, everybody’s healthy and free to live out their dreams.”

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