Are you the type for Berlin? Or rather for Hamburg? Let’s assume you get an attractive job offer for both cities and now you’re asking yourself: Quo vadis? The AI in the smartwatch or on the cell phone tells you – with a hit accuracy beyond anything we have known about forecasts so far. The same goes for relationships: to marry or not? Go or stay? Or: building a house or continuing to rent? It’s best to ask someone who is so much more intelligent than humans.
Artificial intelligence: dolls with character
For normal people it may still sound utopian to leave such fateful questions to a machine. But organizations, researchers and scientists working to improve decision-making processes are investing heavily in the development of artificial intelligence. According to current expert estimates, the market for AI, including software, hardware and services, will reach a volume of 191 billion US dollars worldwide by 2026: AI is finding its way into our everyday life, right down to the intimate area.
The US manufacturer
RealDoll
for example, AI-smart, dialogue-capable, lifelike “partners” with a distinct personality to bachelors worldwide who have renounced the classic-romantic ideal and prefer to live and sleep with a “real” doll. Artificial intelligence is intelligent enough to engage in exciting conversations.
This applies in the bedroom as well as in the executive office: With its outstanding intelligence, the AI also improves professional decision-making. Anyone who finds this strange should be reminded of the sat nav: With a sat nav in the car, no one is tediously studying road maps in the passenger seat anymore. You leave the thinking and searching to the device, because it is GPS-controlled. Skeptics are not convinced.
The AI makes mistakes too
Skeptics point to the sometimes bizarre errors of the AI. Bayrischer Rundfunk recently provided an example of this when ChatGPT, at its request, stated that the traffic light government was a coalition of CDU, SPD and Greens. An AI is only as good as its training. But if it is trained correctly and promptly, it makes almost everything in life better, including our health.
A team of engineers from the University of Waterloo, Canada, has developed AI that makes life and recovery much easier for women diagnosed with breast cancer. She calculates whether chemotherapy before the operation is promising and which women can save themselves the torture and serious side effects of chemo due to the lack of a chance of success. The principle behind it can be generalized to many other diagnoses in a few years with specially trained medical AI’s. This saves the doctor time, the insurer costs, saves patients a lot of disappointment and accelerates the healing of illnesses. And the doctor? Will he lose his job because of the AI? Because she’s so much smarter and better than him?
The job killer argument
The discussion that technology is destroying jobs has not just started today. Luddites protested against the mechanization of the industrial revolution as early as the 19th century. In 1930, the German Musicians’ Association described sound film as a danger to the musician’s profession and music culture in an educational and advertising brochure. We know today that things turned out differently.
According to this proven pattern, millions of jobs will not be destroyed by the AI, but above all will be changed. Individual activities are no longer necessary, but many new needs and jobs are created. According to studies by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, productivity in knowledge work should increase by up to 35 percent through ChatGPT and Co., while at the same time improving quality and job satisfaction. Serious forecasts now predict that AI will be more of a job machine than a job killer. Because it takes a lot of people to design, train, maintain, maintain, further develop, sell an AI … That has always been the case with technological breakthrough innovations.
In addition, AI will not replace people in many professions, but complement them. Hospitals and medical practices would suddenly be empty of patients if there were no longer any human doctor practicing in them. In such expert professions, it will therefore become a matter of course that man and machine work hand in hand. This is already the case in many understaffed editorial offices and news portals, where previously few intelligent programs wrote short reports. But even these bots get better every year – for the benefit of all. Although: really for the good?
Unconscionable AI
The use of AI implies a moral dimension that is currently still flatly denied by many, and for good reason: AI is still unintentionally racist, sexist, engages in mansplaining, puts dark-skinned criminals at a disadvantage compared to light-skinned ones and steers in the event of unavoidable accidents prefer the autonomous car to the teenage group rather than the senior group – as if one life were worth more than the other. The theme behind this is AI ethics, which tend to develop more slowly than AI technology. That’s why leading organizations are already appointing Chief AI Ethics Officers to prevent precisely this danger: if AI, then please ethically established.