Ingenieur Vol 77 Jan-Mar 2019 ingenieur 2019 Jan-March | Page 63

What Others Say About Emerging Technology By Samniang Saenram SMITHSONIAN.COM DIGITAL TREND What will our society look like when Artificial Intelligence is everywhere How AI will change your world in 2019, for better or worse Researchers will be using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to read the signals from neurons on their way to the brain, hacking the nerve pathways to restore mobility to paraplegics and patients suffering from locked-in syndrome, in which they are paralyzed but remain conscious. By 2065, AI has revolutionized the modification of our genomes. Scientists can edit human DNA the way an editor corrects a bad manuscript, snipping out the inferior sections and replacing them with strong, beneficial genes. Only a super intelligent system could map the phenomenally complex interplay of gene mutations that gives rise to a genius pianist or a star second baseman. There may well be another Supreme Court case on whether “designer athletes” should be allowed to compete in the Olympics against mere mortals. Imagine that, in 2065, AI’s help run nation- states. Countries that have adopted AI-assisted Governments are thriving. Nigeria and Malaysia let AI’s vote on behalf of their owners, and they’ve seen corruption and mismanagement wither away. In just a few years, citizens have grown to trust AI’s to advise their leaders on the best path for the economy, the right number of soldiers to defend them. Treaties are negotiated by AI’s trained on diplomatic data sets. In the last decade, artificial intelligence has gone from a science-fiction dream to a critical part of our everyday lives. We use AI systems to interact with our phones and speakers through voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google; cars made by Tesla interpret and analyse their surroundings to intelligently drive themselves; Amazon monitors our browsing habits and then serves up products it thinks we’d like to buy; and even Google decides what results to give us based on our search activity. Artificially intelligent algorithms are here, and they’ve already changed our lives — for better or worse. But this is only the beginning, and one day we’ll look back at AI in 2018 and laugh about how primitive it was. Because in the future, AI is going to change everything. But, do we want it to? AI systems are already primed to take over thousands, if not millions of jobs. Any job that consists of a human taking down information from other humans and inputting it into a system is likely to go obsolete. So cashiers, receptionists, telemarketers, and bank tellers are all on their way out. As self-driving cars, self-operating drones, and other conveyors from A-to-B get more complex, we’ll also lose jobs like truck drivers, postal workers, courier services, and even pizza delivery. Factories are also becoming fully automated, so 61