As artificial intelligence advances, are we going to see more ethical, financial, and social consequences?
AI is growing within our society
AI is being used more and more in recent years. It is being integrated into our society through automating certain procedures in healthcare, finance, retail, manufacturing, marketing and more. In fact, AI in the healthcare industry dates back to the 1970’s, when it was used to help find effective blood infection treatments. And is now used to diagnose patients, identify possible effective drugs, and helps with scheduling in major facilities.
We know AI is being used in automating processes such as analyzing data, improving scheduling, and so on, but what about more hands on and repetitive roles. Jobs which require man power, or industry experience, but are also repetitive in nature, such as factory workers.
Estimations as of 2023
Source: Market Scoop, Robotics statistics
The growth of robotics and its use within industries is unprecedented. Every year, the market for robots increases, as AI is being implemented into a multitude of industries, mostly factory workers, and spaces where jobs are repetitive.
Positive future impacts
- Increased economic growth and productivity
- Robots could easily overtake repetitive, and physically demanding jobs very easily, as they can work 24 hours a day. This would increase the production of goods and in turn support economic growth.
- Improved customer service
- Due to AI’s extreme efficiency, customer service can be available 24/7, have fast response times, and have use precise decision-making.
- Cost reduction
- The cost of automating tasks would reduce the overall expenses as it would completely eliminate the cost for human resources.
- Reduced risk / increased safety
- Certain dangerous jobs such as welders could be replaced with robots, this mitigates the risk of serious harm towards the workers.
- Reduced human error
- No matter what, people make mistakes, its impossible to be 100% accurate at whatever you’re doing. This means integrating AI into the workplace would reduce the number of errors.
Negative future impacts
- Job displacement
- The first con that comes to mind when talking about implementing AI is job displacement. As AI takes over more and more jobs, people will be forced to find new work.
- Ethical Concerns & bias
- If a certain AI system has been fed biased information, it would make biased and unfair decisions. More ethical issues with AI include the ability to displace work and the lack of transparency for AI technology.
- Reliability
- Many AI tools learn by using data, but if they are taught with the wrong information, their decision-making and reliability are hindered.
- Loss of human interaction
- If people rely more on AI for social interactions, it reduces actual human contact, which has been linked to causing poor mental health.