AI ( artificial intelligence ) is becoming more and more familiar with the birth of the word IoT . How will AI change medicine, education, and work? How will life change? I think there are many people who are interested in such things. This time, I will explain the advantages and disadvantages of AI.
Table of Contents
- What is AI?
- What is AI?
- What AI can and cannot do
- Examples of AI in everyday life
- Where is AI used?
- 7 benefits of AI and specific examples
- 1. Operational efficiency
- 2. Elimination of labor shortage
- 3. Data analysis/prediction
- 4. Get a convenient life
- 5. Cost savings
- 6. Improved safety
- 7. Improves quality of communication
- Three Disadvantages of AI and Specific Examples
- 1. Responsibility
- 2. You can’t see your thought process
- 3. Fewer jobs
- Solutions to Disadvantages and Problems of AI
- Responsibility for what the AI does lies with the owner of the AI
- There are benefits to reducing employment.
- summary
What is AI?
First of all, what exactly is AI? Before learning about the advantages and disadvantages, let’s deepen our knowledge about AI first.
What is AI?
AI is an abbreviation for “Artificial Intelligence ” . AI can reproduce some of the actions performed by humans with software, so it can perform various tasks in business and daily life.
What AI can and cannot do
AI that works in place of humans is very convenient, but of course there are things it cannot do. Examples of what you can do are:
- Speech recognition (reading text, transcribing human voices)
- Image recognition (can recognize what is in the image)
- Natural language processing (can understand language and create sentences)
The main three are:
On the other hand, what we cannot do is
- make something from scratch
- understand people’s emotions
Etc. Creativity to create new things is unique to humans.
In addition, AI cannot be entrusted with management tasks that require the ability to sense and understand people’s emotions, as well as jobs such as nursery teachers.
Examples of AI in everyday life
Did you know that AI is lurking in our everyday lives?
For example, “Siri” on the iPhone and iPad is a function that uses AI voice recognition. Predictive conversion that comes out when you type on a mobile phone or computer is language processing ability, a camera app that can take cute pictures is image recognition ability, etc. AI is involved in the back of our convenient lives.
Where is AI used?
AI is used not only in daily life but also in work. AI is used to streamline operations in the workplace, medical care, and education.
7 benefits of AI and specific examples
Now that we have a deeper understanding of AI, let’s dive deeper into the benefits of AI. Here are 7 benefits:
- Operational efficiency
- Elimination of labor shortage
- Data analysis/prediction
- get a convenient life
- Cost reduction
- Improved safety
- improve the quality of communication
We will introduce the above seven points along with specific examples of how they are actually used and how they are useful.
1. Operational efficiency
The first advantage of AI is “ improvement of work efficiency ”.
AI performs simple tasks in place of humans in a wide range of fields such as business and education.
If you are a company, you can improve the efficiency of your work by entrusting routine work to AI. For example, chatbots, call center response, reception systems, etc.
In education, AI is useful for automating test scoring and optimizing learning for students. It is the same as improving the efficiency of a company’s work by reducing detailed work such as test scoring.
2. Elimination of labor shortage
The second advantage of AI is ” elimination of labor shortage “. Japan is an aging society, and the working population is decreasing year by year. That’s where AI comes into play.
Various shops such as convenience stores and apparel shops are becoming unmanned. There are not many unmanned stores using AI yet, but it is expected to increase in the future.
3. Data analysis/prediction
The third advantage of AI is “ data analysis and prediction ”.
AI is good at collecting, analyzing and predicting huge amounts of data. This ability to surpass humans is useful in medicine and marketing.
In medical care, AI can diagnose medical conditions from CT/MRI images and help doctors make diagnoses. AI is able to learn and analyze more data than the human brain can memorize, so it can diagnose various diseases.
In addition, companies such as Coca-Cola Japan and Ebiya, which sells souvenirs from Mie Prefecture, have succeeded in increasing sales through marketing that utilizes AI data analysis.
4. Get a convenient life
The fourth advantage of AI is that it will give us a convenient life .
As I gave a specific example earlier, our lives have become inseparable from AI, such as Siri on the iPhone, predictive conversion, and camera apps.
Services such as Amazon and YouTube, which have many users, also recommend products that suit users based on past browsing history.
In recent years, smart speakers that can be operated only by voice have become common. It is no exaggeration to say that AI will make our lives more and more convenient.
5. Cost savings
The fifth advantage of AI is ” cost reduction “.
By leveraging AI to optimize operations, companies can reduce costs in a variety of ways. For example, the unmanned cash registers and call centers I mentioned earlier have also led to cost reductions in the area of “no labor costs”.
Another example of cost reduction using AI is “pesticide spraying by AI-equipped drones.”
If you use AI-equipped drones to spray pesticides, you can spray pesticides without human intervention, and you can use image recognition to apply pesticides where you need them and in the amounts you need. As a result, costs such as labor costs and pesticide costs can be reduced.
6. Improved safety
The sixth advantage of AI is ” improved safety “.
While humans often make some kind of mistake, AI is good at accurately performing repetitive tasks and detecting and predicting abnormalities and dangers from data, so it can be said that the possibility of making a mistake is low. .
Therefore, the use of AI will lead to improved safety.
An example of the use of AI to improve safety is the reduction of accidents in autonomous driving.
According to the 6th term report of the “ASV Promotion Study Group” under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism , if self-driving cars comply with traffic rules and the system works correctly, about 90% of accidents caused by own vehicles It seems that you can prevent it.
Another example of how safety can be improved is automatic inspection of infrastructure.
For example, AI-based inspections and anomaly detection are used in a variety of situations, such as automatic detection of cavities that are at high risk of causing damage to river bank protection and road surface subsidence.
7. Improves quality of communication
The seventh advantage of AI is that it improves the quality of communication .
AI is good at natural language processing, so it can create and analyze words instead of humans. It can improve the quality of our human communication.
For example, the chatbot I mentioned earlier improves the quality of communication by streamlining the response to customer inquiries.
Also, “automatic translation” is one of the examples that can improve the quality of communication. The accuracy of translation by AI has greatly improved with the advent of deep learning, and it is now possible to translate a large amount of sentences into various languages in an instant.
Three Disadvantages of AI and Specific Examples
What are the advantages and disadvantages of AI? Next, I will introduce three disadvantages of AI.
1. Responsibility
One of the disadvantages of AI is that it is not clear where responsibility lies.
For example, if a self-driving car causes an accident, is the person in the car responsible? Or is the company or factory that made the car responsible?
Since these are not stipulated by law, it is better to be aware of them as risks before introducing AI.
2. You can’t see your thought process
In AI, there is something called the “black box problem”. The “black box problem” is the problem of not being able to see the thinking process of AI.
In 2016, the case of AI beating a professional Go player became famous, but no one knows how AI was able to beat the professional because the thought process is invisible.
3. Fewer jobs
As AI technology progresses, jobs such as cashiers and clerks will no longer need to be done by humans. Even in companies, AI will take over simple tasks, and it is thought that this will lead to a reduction in personnel.
Losing jobs for sports referees, telephone operators, hotel receptionists, etc. is something that happens. In order not to be replaced by AI, it is a good idea to acquire specialized and creative skills.
Solutions to Disadvantages and Problems of AI
So far, we have learned that while AI has its advantages, it also has its disadvantages.
So is there a solution to the drawbacks? From here, we will introduce solutions to the disadvantages and problems of AI.
Responsibility for what the AI does lies with the owner of the AI
As a disadvantage of AI, I mentioned that “I do not know where the responsibility lies”. Regarding this, there is an answer that “Basically, the responsibility for what the AI has done lies with the owner of the AI.”
There are benefits to reducing employment.
Since AI will take over simple tasks, there was also the disadvantage of a decrease in employment. If you change your way of thinking about this, you can benefit from it.
This is because AI can perform simple tasks that humans have done until now, allowing humans to concentrate on more creative work. A reduction in working hours is also an advantage.
summary
How was it?
This time, I explained the basic knowledge about AI and the advantages and disadvantages of AI.
