Artificial Intelligence has revolutionized many aspects of our daily lives, making them more convenient. From digital assistance and entertainment to the development of autonomous vehicles, AI has made a positive impact on many lives. However, as time passes on, AI is beginning to outstrip the decisions and thoughts of humans, leading to several significant problems. Although this life-changing invention has proven highly beneficial to us, its extreme use has caused detrimental effects such as job losses, bias in the justice system, unhealthy relationships, and privacy invasions.
Efficiency has become one of the most important priorities in modern-day society. Therefore the use of artificial intelligence is growing immensely due to its ability to complete various tasks easily and quickly. Nevertheless, this rapid rise in AI usage led to a significant increase in human job losses. For example, many restaurants are now replacing human waiters with robots. Several restaurants have decided to use robots instead of human employees, leading to job losses for many. Even though these robotic waiters can take orders, serve food, and handle payments efficiently, human emotion has been lost from these “workers”, creating communication challenges. For example, customers new to the restaurants cannot ask for recommended menus from AI robots, and can’t experience human-to-waiter interaction.
Robotic waiters may have made restaurant experiences inconvenient, but the loss of human influence and improved accuracy has amplified bias, as only some things have an accurate answer. For instance, the increase in AI usage in hospitals has created misunderstandings between the AI systems and the patients. AI’s inability to fully comprehend a patient’s true emotions can result in inappropriate treatment recommendations. A case example of this is when a 45-year-old woman experiencing chronic fatigue and weight loss visits her local hospital where an AI-driven diagnostic system analyzes her symptoms and medical history. Based on the data, the AI concludes that the woman has depression and prescribes her antidepressants. However, feeling that the diagnosis did not really capture her symptoms, she goes to a human oncologist for a second opinion. Through the examination and additional tests, the tests reveal that the woman has early-stage lymphoma, a type of cancer that requires immediate treatment. The initial AI system had failed to detect the possibility of cancer because AI relies on statistical probabilities and patterns from previous data. Furthermore, doctors have also raised concerns about AI’s impacts on patient-physician relationships and patient privacy. AI has made it harder to ensure a healthy and positive impact on patients. Not only is it important to provide better healthcare and clinical practices to the patients, but it is also crucial to maintain the core values of the patient-to-physician relationship- such as trust and honesty. Without human communication, it is difficult to convey these core values and gain the trust of the patients. This limitation in the AI system underscores the importance of maintaining human involvement in healthcare to ensure patient safety and well-being.
Privacy has also been evaded due to accident leaks. Other than just password leaks, private and personal information could be exposed to anyone if they are not secured properly. As AI advances over time and becomes a powerful source, the potential chances of information leaks have increased. For instance, there have been numerous instances of the White House computer and network being hacked. In around 2015, hackers in Russia had access to sensitive information such as non-public details of the president’s schedule. With security breaches happening throughout history, and as AI further moves along, the chances of more serious problems and privacy violations being caused are rising. In addition to this, AI has also learned to collect data from social media by analyzing the amount of time spent with each content. This means that social media platforms have access to a lot of personal information. By concluding these data, unwanted content may appear, and potentially be revealed to others.
Although artificial intelligence has positively changed our lives, relying on AI has resulted in multiple problems. Current and future problems are outweighing the positive impacts AI had in our lives in numerous ways. The efficient memory box has increased the risks of human interaction as well as several privacy issues, resulting in information leaks and loss of jobs.
By: Taehee Kim
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