Navigating to work using Google’s map app? Thank artificial intelligence’s predictive tools.
Click on the quirky news story Facebook just suggested? It was selected for you through an AI-infused algorithm.
Send the Roomba vacuum robot to clean up around the house? It used AI to map the room, identify obstacles and remember the most efficient routes.
The rapid development of powerful artificial intelligence is upending a variety of aspects of everyday life such as shopping, education and financial services. AI gives machines the capability of completing complex tasks.
AI is a field of science and engineering that helps machines process large amounts of information, applying statistics and searching for patterns to come up with answers to assigned tasks.
Its benefits are already all around.
SEE ALSO: Welcome to Wendy’s, may AI take your order?
But so are its risks.
Fraudsters harness AI to steal identities, taking money from vulnerable grandparents — or, on a larger scale, from unprotected government systems.
Politicians worry the tech will be used to manipulate voters, perhaps through the use of deepfake videos to invent embarrassing gaffes that never really happened.
And fears are rising of doomsday scenarios of villains using AI to learn instructions for making bombs.
Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, who is working on AI legislation, said the apocalyptic scenarios are concerning but other nightmares about people’s reaction to the tech are worrisome, too.
“There is such revolutionary change that is happening so much more quickly than say the electricity revolution or the steam revolution a century before that, even quicker than the internet connectivity revolution, that the pace of change is so fast, how is humanity going to keep up?” Mr. Schumer, New York Democrat, said at a Washington Post Live event.
SEE ALSO: Pentagon looks warily at uses for mind control; China already uses technology
The Biden administration on Monday announced what it called the strictest set of rules by any government so far to try to build guardrails into AI’s progress. A major goal is to promote trust among a public not quite certain what it all means.
But they’ve been living with AI for years.
Apple and Google’s maps applications that suggest routes for travelers with live traffic patterns and weather forecasts are made possible through the deployment of predictive analytical tools using AI.
The virtual assistants in people’s pockets, such as Apple’s Siri, are a primitive example of where things are headed.
For example, the fast-food eatery Wendy’s debuted its AI bot in June that takes diners’ orders at a drive-thru in Ohio. The Wendy’s FreshAI bot uses Google’s AI tools to have conversations with customers and figure out orders.
“If a customer asks for a large chocolate milkshake, the system knows to make it a large chocolate Frosty,” Matt Spessard, Wendy’s senior vice president, said in June. “Wendy’s FreshAI pairs an AI-powered voice experience with a visual order display on a digital menu board, so drive-thru customers can have confidence in the order accuracy as they interact with the automated ordering system.”
In the medical field, some AI developments seem almost miraculous.
A woman who lost her ability to speak 18 years ago because of a stroke used a brain implant and AI tech to talk with a replication of her voice and a digital avatar of herself, according to MIT Technology Review.
For the national security community, the promise of AI assistants means solving complex problems under intense pressure with time winding down.
Booz Allen Hamilton’s Patrick Biltgen, who works with U.S. agencies, said at a recent security summit that he foresees American spies using AI similar to how Tony Stark relies on the AI character J.A.R.V.I.S in the superhero story “Iron Man.”
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.