How Humans and AI Are Working Together in 2021

No longer the stuff of science fiction novels, artificial intelligence (AI) is contributing to society and our culture in many ways.

The co-existence of human and machine intelligence, however, is a controversial subject. Before we can look at the ways humans and AI interact, we should understand what it is.

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Defining AI

According to Micro Focus, AI is the ability of a machine or computer to imitate the capabilities of the human mind. AI taps into multiple technologies to equip machines in planning, acting, comprehending, learning, and sensing with human-like intelligence.

There are two basic types: strong AI and weak AI. Weak AI is an artificial intelligence created to do a single task. Strong AI has intelligence that equals that of a human and a level of self-awareness that enables it to use judgment, learn and solve problems independent of human input. Today, strong AI is only theoretical.

The Value of Collaboration

Entrepreneur says that corporate productivity is increased by 40 percent when artificial intelligence is introduced. It adds, though, that 72 percent of employees fear that AI will take their jobs.

While some jobs may, indeed, fall to AI in the workplace, others will be created. Since AI is used for specific tasks, humans must input data and watch for errors.

Additionally, some professions like social work and psychology are unsuitable for AI because it is incapable of empathy, but the organization of social data from which “best practices” are derived is a perfect application of artificial intelligence. Collaboration between humans and AI is valuable in many areas.

Humans Assisting Machines

It has already been stated that AI can only work if humans input the data. There is a website called 20Q that is a derivative of the old parlor guessing game. Users think of a subject or thing, and the computer asks 20 questions such as “can it eat?”

From the answers it gets to its questions (data input) the machine learns. The program has been learning for several years now, and its success rate in guessing the answer is astounding.

So, one way in which humans help AI is by teaching it. Another benefit of human interaction in the collaboration of AI and humans is that, while computers can organize and compute data, it may not all be relevant or even correct.

Humans are needed to make certain that sets of data contain the right facts and are collected from the right sources.

Machines Assisting Humans

Of course, humans become bored with repetitive tasks, and their accuracy declines. AI grows better at a repeated task the more often it performs it. That means AI is valuable in areas such as assembly lines or in computing set tasks through long columns of data.

Surgeons certainly see the value of robotic operations and automated pharmaceutical drips. AI is also more suited to interpreting immense fields of data necessary for things like predicting weather patterns and forecasting natural disasters.

Machine Intelligence VS Human Intelligence

All of this leads to the conclusion that A.I. artificial intelligence and deep learning may someday simulate human intelligence, but it is only a simulation.

Ethics, intuition, and empathy are all important pieces of solving life problems that computers cannot perform, and these pieces cannot be translated into algorithms or data sets.

AI is not going to disappear. It is too valuable an asset. It is, however, not going to make humankind obsolete either. Rather, the two will happily coexist to make tomorrow brighter.

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