Great promise of AI applications

The term of AI (Artificial Intelligence) is a technology created by human that enable machines to implement most of tasks totally performed by human intelligence before. Making more progress over decades, AI has been significantly applied in various industries, including digital marketing, retails, manufacturing, banking and even health care.

At the beginning, AI was assumed to take the general repetitive tasks involving low decision-making of human beings, for example in (machine) translation which was developed and applied by Google and other companies long time ago. However, under researching and developing, AI has applied more and more in many fields with much sophistication. As Joseph Fuller, professor at Harvard Business School, stated: “Virtually every big company now has multiple AI systems and counts the deployment of AI as integral to their strategy’.

Processing huge data sets, AI now can help business to promote in targeting marketing in real-time. Thanks to quickly its robust analysis, companies use AI more from management of resources of materials and products to supporting in decision-making processes.

For some industries, especially in pharmaceuticals, in which the trial and error of product development is required and expensive, AI can reduce the  required time of that process. Also, Health-care experts can benefit from of AI applications from billing and paperwork processing to obtain outputs of image analysis and diagnosis.

AI applications’ potential perils

Apart from the recognized achievements of AI, there are more ethical concerns of  AI adoption which can be classified as three following areas:

• Bias and discrimination: This concern relates to the fact that AI decisions are not from human being. Accordingly, such decisions are not intelligible to humans. People are resonably to suspect AI’s outcomes in terms of inaccuracy, discrimination and inserted or embedded bias. In other words, AI-based systems can deliver biased results which likely lead to other human-based consequences relied on them. Let’s look into one of the widely adopted AI applications is facial recognition used both in law (to identify criminals in public) and commerce (to identify legal users). However, like any technology, there is no gurantee for accuracy of its outputs as well as illegal usage of them. Therefore, this technology without strictly ruled or defined has led to biased outcomes or misusage.

• Privacy and surveillance: AI’s strong ability of gathering and analysing huge data from various sources raises drawbacks. It’s agreed to assert that many people don’t realize how many devices, networks, visited sites, products or services they use everday. Such activities required users’ acceptance of their data exploitation partly or fully which make their personal data further exploited by third parties. How people can be assured that their personal data would not be collected and then utilized for illegal purposes? One featured sample of such activities is the AI application in automobile industry. Although this AI technology helps to self-drive, track your locations as well as make your driving safer and smarter, it also makes your personal data collected across different devices at home, work or public spaces become a part of bigger data beyond your knowledgability. It means that your personal information is vulnerable to data exploitation by other parties.
• Role of human judgment: Human beings will more and more rely much on AI’s outputs. The regulatory bodies cannot keep pace with the AI’s advancements and applications. How to ensure fairness of human-based important decisions refer to AI-based outcomes as well as no risk with such decisions? Back to the AI application sample mentioned above in electric cars, how existing regulatory agencies in safety associations could handle new AI issues emerging in autonomous cars rather than their original purpose of transportation surveillance could be questioned.

Finally, companies pursuiting to profit could undermine the ethical concerns while intergrating AI into their whole businesses. It’s time the regulations should manage and decide what role of data usage and social media to play safely in our lives.