How its being implemented

Artificial intelligence is being implemented in several ways.

It starts with our mornings. We wake up, and we look at our phones immediatly. If it is an iphone, we can even ask Siri- a virtual assistant that iphones have- how’s the weather, what time is it, and we can even ask her to call anyone we want.

AI has been growing in multiple ways, helping us on a daily basis. Nowadays, almost everything we own (eletronics) have a bit of AI. There are even refrigerators who can talk to us!

If we have a problem, for example, with our phones, or we want to know more about a specific thing in a website, guess who will help us? A chat bot. A chat bot uses pre programmed language to talk to us in a simple way. This is specially being implemented in big companies, since they want to have a lucrative business, they save money and time by making these chat bots and virtual assistants. With the data that the bots collect, they adapt to the various situations or problems that a person may be experiencing and resolve them without the help of a human being.

We are in continuous contact with Artificial Inteligence without even knowing. But the biggest accomplishment of AI is definetly Robot Sophia.

She, or it, is capable of reproduce more than sixty facial expressions. She was created to learn and adapt to the human behavior and work with human beings. She is now a citizen of Arabia. She gets smarter over time, as she uses advanced Artificial Intelligence. She can see, she can follow faces, sustain eye contact, and recognize individuals. She is able to process speech and have conversations using a natural language. In 2018, she was upgraded with functional legs and the ability to walk.

In conclusion, AI is now a part of our life. It helps us everyday with anything we want or need. We just have to use it with care.

Márcia Valente

How it has and will change our lives

So far AI is being used nowadays from mobile phones to cars. As for mobile phones, if you have an iPhone you will have Siri and if you have an Android you will have Google Assistant.  These AI assistants will help you with some simple tasks, like searching something on the internet, knowing the time, setting alarms, calling for someone or sending a message just by saying to them what we want. As for cars we have the self-driving cars with the AI of driving or parking on their own. These AI systems have made our lives a lot easier because it will be quicker just telling them to do it than actually performing the tasks . These are just a few examples of some ways AI has changed our lives.

How it is going to change our lives is an exciting topic when thinking about what might happen, because technology is something that develops at an enormous speed. Now we can take power to charge our phones in our bags and that was impossible about 10 years ago. As we can see with the example referred to above, we have started to depend on technology in our lives and with the advances from Artificial Intelligence our life will be completely dependent on AI. This will affect various fields like, for example, Medical Science, Automated Transportation and even becoming Human Assistants.

Concerning Medical Science, AI gives the computer the capability of thinking, learning and understanding human psychology. AI is capable of helping de doctors in doing more accurate diagnostics and, for example in surgery, they may be used to help the doctors and the surgery achieve a higher success rate. One advance that will definitely help us is the Flowsky Toilet. This toilet has a sensor that measures changes in the urine to calculate the urine volume and flow rate and then will provide the results, so we can see if everything is okay.

In Automated Transportation, we already have vehicles that are self-driving, but the presence of a human is still necessary. However, with the development of AI, the presence of any human will not be needed, and the vehicles (cars, buses or trains) will drive themselves anywhere. With this development, road accidents will not happen so often (hopefully…).

Regarding robots becoming Human assistants, they will be used, for example, in cooking and shopping. In cooking, the robots will be able to learn how to cook new foods, only needing to know the ingredients and how to add them. In the future, for shopping, people will simply need to say what they want to the AI robot and it will buy things and bring them to the person.

Maria Coelho

How it can improve in the future

Artificial intelligence today is properly known as narrow or weak AI and it’s designed to perform a narrow task such as facial recognition or driving a car. However, the long-term goal of many researchers is to create Strong AI. This would outperform humans at nearly every cognitive task, instead of outperforming them at whatever its specific task is.

With Strong AI being able to outperform humans at any given task, it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine AI replacing a lot of our current jobs. We already see similar situations to this with machines replacing manufacturing jobs and even some service jobs, like ordering at a machine in a fast-food restaurant. Would this lead us to a leisurely paradise where no one has to work or simply lead to an economic crisis where the rich capital owners who are able to purchase and operate these AI-programs would become even richer while workers lose their jobs? Considering the effects of industrialization it would probably end up being the latter.

Military risks can also be associated with improving AI. For example, if a country develops strong AI capable of optimising drone and guided missile usage and decides to apply it to their military, the results could be devastating.

On the other hand, what about AI that isn’t designed to harm but decides that the most efficient way to solve a given task is achieved through causing harm? Take the criminal justice system as an example. As a society we might agree that the optimal way to reduce crime would be, for example, rehabilitation, education, reducing poverty and creating stable households. However, an AI system might decide that the most efficient way is to simply “dispose of” demographics with the highest crime rate.

With time Strong AI could turn into our last creation. Getting to a point where it could start creating and improving by itself, eventually developing inventions on its own, would eliminate the need for us to create anything new.

The potential for good an improved future AI could achieve is, to a certain extent, unimaginable but so it is the potential harm. Wherever the evolution of AI leads us, we must make sure that we consider all possible effects it will have on us as a society and create safeguards to reduce any potential harm that comes with it.

Mariana Xavier