How is AI helping humanity?

Question

There was a lot of Negative news on Artificial Intelligence. Most people were first exposed to the idea of artificial intelligence from Hollywood movies, long before they ever started seeing it in their day-to-day lives. This means that many people misunderstand the technology. When they think about common examples that they’ve seen in movies or television shows, they may not realize that the killer robots they’ve seen were created to sell emotional storylines and drive the entertainment industry, rather than to reflect the actual state of AI technology.

There are few questions on our SE on how AI impacts/harms humankind. For example, How could artificial intelligence harm us? and Could artificial general intelligence harm humanity?

However, now, I'm looking for the positive impacts of AI on humans. How could AI help humankind?

Answer 1

For good or bad, AI is the next step in automation. The impact which is already visible, and trends show will continue in the future, is the eradication of repetitive and body-straining labor.

Hopefully, the transformation will be gradual enough for the global labor market to re-adjust, otherwise, we'll face a problem of growing unemployment. It seems to me that we've become aware enough to foresee bad outcomes of our inventions, hence in almost every dimension affected by AI, a plausible and either positive or negative future can be presented, depending on the sentiment of the storyteller.

Regardless of what different experts and sci-fi writers tell us about the future, actually predicting it is a futile endeavour. Considering that predictions made for a dynamic system, even when we have a lot of data and good models (like about the weather), become unreliable just for a few weeks ahead.

Answer 2

We've already seen significant progress in fields that we could not even come close to prior to the explosion in AI research. For example, the automated identification of cancerous tumours in lung tissues could save countless lives, as a computer never tires and has no bias. Incredible advances in speech synthesis can allow people who lost or never had a voice to have their own human-sounding voice. Personally, I also predict soon we will be able to synthesise music to an individual's tastes.

Advances in rapid image processing, thanks to the polynomial complexity of machine learning techniques, allows for advanced guidance systems and autonomous cars that are only improving. Ranking algorithms for listings allow for finely tuned results for a user's search. Unsupervised techniques can help us separate suspicious activity in banking records to catch fraudulent transactions.

There is a very, very long list here and this only scratches the surface. AI is already benefiting us enormously, to the point where very soon, if not already, I would say we will become so dependant on learning techniques that if they were outlawed, entire systems may collapse.