What Is AI Technology and How Is It Used?
Artificial intelligence is being used in hundreds of ways all around us. It has changed our world and made our lives more convenient and interesting. Some of the many uses of AI you may know include:
Voice recognition. Most people know to call out for Siri when they need directions, or to ask their smart home Alexa to set a timer. This technology is a form of artificial intelligence. Machine learning helps Siri, Alexa, and other voice recognition devices learn about you and your preferences, helping it know how to help you. These tools also utilize artificial intelligence to pull in answers to your questions or perform the tasks you ask.
Self-driving cars. Machine learning and visual recognition are used in autonomous vehicles to help the car understand its surroundings and be able to react accordingly. Facial recognition and biometric systems help self-driving cars recognize people and keep them safe. These cars can learn and adapt to traffic patterns, signs, and more.
Chatbots. Many companies are utilizing artificial intelligence to strengthen their customer service teams. Chatbots can interact with customers and answer generic questions without needing to use a real human’s time. They can learn and adapt to certain responses, get more information to help them produce a different output, and more. A certain word can trigger them to put out a certain definition as a response. This expert system can give a human-level of interaction to customers.
Online shopping. Online shopping systems utilize algorithms to learn more about your preferences and predict what you’ll want to shop for. They can then put those items right in front of you, helping them grab your attention quickly. Amazon and other retailers are constantly working their algorithms to learn more about you and what you might buy.
Streaming services. When you sit down to watch your favorite TV show or listen to your favorite music, you may get other suggestions that seem interesting to you. That’s artificial intelligence at work! It learns about your preferences and uses algorithms to process all the TV shows, movies, or music it has and finds patterns to give you suggestions.
Healthcare technology. AI is playing a huge role in healthcare technology as new tools to diagnose, develop medicine, monitor patients, and more are all being utilized. The technology can learn and develop as it is used, learning more about the patient or the medicine, and adapt to get better and improve as time goes on.
Factory and warehouse systems. Shipping and retail industries will never be the same thanks to AI-related software. Systems that automate the entire shipping process and learn as they go are making things work more quickly and more efficiently. These entire systems are transforming how warehouses and factories run, making them more safe and productive.
Educational tools. Things like plagiarism checkers and citation finders can help educators and students utilize artificial intelligence to enhance papers and research. The artificial intelligence systems can read the words used, and use their databases to research everything they know in the blink of an eye. It allows them to check spelling, grammar, for plagiarized content, and more.
There are many other uses of AI all around us every day, technology is advancing at a rapid pace and is continually changing how we live.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming our world. Remarkable surges in AI capabilities have led to a wide range of innovations including autonomous vehicles and connected Internet of Things devices in our homes. AI is even contributing to the development of a brain-controlled robotic arm that can help a paralyzed person feel again through complex direct human-brain interfaces. These new AI-enabled systems are revolutionizing and benefitting nearly all aspects of our society and economy – everything from commerce and healthcare to transportation and cybersecurity. But the development and use of the new technologies it brings are not without technical challenges and risks.
NIST contributes to the research, standards and data required to realize the full promise of artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool that will enable American innovation, enhance economic security and improve our quality of life. Much of our work focuses on cultivating trust in the design, development, use and governance of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and systems. We are doing this by:
Conducting fundamental research to advance trustworthy AI technologies and understand and measure their capabilities and limitations
Applying AI research and innovation across NIST laboratory programs
Establishing benchmarks and developing data and metrics to evaluate AI technologies
Leading and participating in the development of technical AI standards
Contributing to discussions and development of AI policies, including supporting the National AI Advisory Committee
NIST’s AI efforts fall in several categories:
Fundamental AI Research NIST’s AI portfolio includes fundamental research into and development of AI technologies — including software, hardware, architectures and human interaction and teaming — vital for AI computational trust. Applied AI Research AI approaches are increasingly an essential component in new research. NIST scientists and engineers use various machine learning and AI tools to gain a deeper understanding of and insight into their research. At the same time, NIST laboratory experiences with AI are leading to a better understanding of AI’s capabilities and limitations. AI Measurement and Evaluation With a long history of devising and revising metrics, measurement tools, standards and test beds, NIST increasingly is focusing on the evaluation of technical characteristics of trustworthy AI. Technical Standards NIST leads and participates in the development of technical standards, including international standards, that promote innovation and public trust in systems that use AI. A broad spectrum of standards for AI data, performance and governance are — and increasingly will be — a priority for the use and creation of trustworthy and responsible AI.
A fact sheet describes NIST's AI programs.
Cultivating Trust in AI Technologies
AI and Machine Learning (ML) is changing the way in which society addresses economic and national security challenges and opportunities. It is being used in genomics, image and video processing, materials, natural language processing, robotics, wireless spectrum monitoring and more. These technologies must be developed and used in a trustworthy and responsible manner.
While answers to the question of what makes an AI technology trustworthy may differ depending on whom you ask, there are certain key characteristics which support trustworthiness, including accuracy, explainability and interpretability, privacy, reliability, robustness, safety, and security (resilience) and mitigation of harmful bias. Principles such as transparency, fairness and accountability should be considered, especially during deployment and use. Trustworthy data, standards and evaluation, validation, and verification are critical for the successful deployment of AI technologies.
Delivering the needed measurements, standards and other tools is a primary focus for NIST’s portfolio of AI efforts. It is an area in which NIST has special responsibilities and expertise. NIST relies heavily on stakeholder input, including via workshops, and issues most publications in draft for comment.
What is AI? Here's everything you need to know about artificial intelligence
The possibility of artificially intelligent systems replacing much of modern manual labour is perhaps a more credible near-future possibility.
While AI won't replace all jobs, what seems to be certain is that AI will change the nature of work, with the only question being how rapidly and how profoundly automation will alter the workplace.
There is barely a field of human endeavour that AI doesn't have the potential to impact. As AI expert Andrew Ng puts it: "many people are doing routine, repetitive jobs. Unfortunately, technology is especially good at automating routine, repetitive work", saying he sees a "significant risk of technological unemployment over the next few decades".
The evidence of which jobs will be supplanted is starting to emerge. There are now 27 Amazon Go stores and cashier-free supermarkets where customers just take items from the shelves and walk out in the US. What this means for the more than three million people in the US who work as cashiers remains to be seen. Amazon again is leading the way in using robots to improve efficiency inside its warehouses. These robots carry shelves of products to human pickers who select items to be sent out. Amazon has more than 200 000 bots in its fulfilment centers, with plans to add more. But Amazon also stresses that as the number of bots has grown, so has the number of human workers in these warehouses. However, Amazon and small robotics firms are working on automating the remaining manual jobs in the warehouse, so it's not a given that manual and robotic labor will continue to grow hand-in-hand.
Fully autonomous self-driving vehicles aren't a reality yet, but by some predictions, the self-driving trucking industry alone is poised to take over 1.7 million jobs in the next decade, even without considering the impact on couriers and taxi drivers.
Yet, some of the easiest jobs to automate won't even require robotics. At present, there are millions of people working in administration, entering and copying data between systems, chasing and booking appointments for companies as software gets better at automatically updating systems and flagging the important information, so the need for administrators will fall.
As with every technological shift, new jobs will be created to replace those lost. However, what's uncertain is whether these new roles will be created rapidly enough to offer employment to those displaced and whether the newly unemployed will have the necessary skills or temperament to fill these emerging roles.
Not everyone is a pessimist. For some, AI is a technology that will augment rather than replace workers. Not only that, but they argue there will be a commercial imperative to not replace people outright, as an AI-assisted worker -- think a human concierge with an AR headset that tells them exactly what a client wants before they ask for it -- will be more productive or effective than an AI working on its own.
There's a broad range of opinions about how quickly artificially intelligent systems will surpass human capabilities among AI experts.
Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute asked several hundred machine-learning experts to predict AI capabilities over the coming decades.
Notable dates included AI writing essays that could pass for being written by a human by 2026, truck drivers being made redundant by 2027, AI surpassing human capabilities in retail by 2031, writing a best-seller by 2049, and doing a surgeon's work by 2053.
They estimated there was a relatively high chance that AI beats humans at all tasks within 45 years and automates all human jobs within 120 years.
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