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Artificial Intelligence: A Disruptive Technology

Impact and Challenges Associated with AI

If these sectors are combined and world economy is seen as a whole, the impact of AI is going to alter the world economic growth significantly as substantiated below:

  • Increase in Economic Output: A 2018 report by McKinsey Global Institute says that Artificial Intelligence has the potential to incrementally add 16 percent by 2030 to current global economic output. The major contributors to this figure are the automation of labor and innovations in products and services.
  • Disruption across the Sectors: However, in addition to its economic benefits, AI will also lead to significant disruptions for workers, companies and economies. There will likely be considerable costs associated with managing labor-market transitions, especially for workers being left behind by AI technologies, which could reduce the gross impact of AI.
  • Inequality: There is also a threat that AI adoption could widen gaps between countries, companies, and workers.
  • Skill Gap between Workers: In addition, AI will lead to large shifts in the demand for skills, potentially widening the gaps between workers. While some workers are at risk of being replaced by machines, there could be a shortage of workers whose value is greatly amplified by working alongside machines.
  • Data Privacy and Security: Most AI applications rely on huge volumes of data to learn and make intelligent decisions. Machine Learning systems feast on data – often sensitive and personal in nature – to learn from them and enhance themselves. This makes it vulnerable to serious issues like data breach and identity theft.
  • Provability: People are skeptical about it, as they fail to understand how it makes decisions. Provability – the level of mathematical certainty behind AI predictions – remains a grey area for organisations.
  • Algorithm Bias: An inherent problem with AI systems is that they are only as good – or as bad – as the data they are trained on. Bad data is often laced with racial, gender, communal or ethnic biases. For instance, when a software was used to predict future criminals, it showed bias against black people.

Way Forward

Overall, the picture that emerges is one of rising wage and employment opportunity inequality and groups with superior skill sets may capture a disproportionate share of gains. So government should invest in AI research, skilled force, and infrastructure to harness early advantage.

  • World leaders and international bodies should try to keep this disruptive technology humane and ensure its fruit being shared across the humanity and nations.
  • Rules should be framed to contain the disruption in trade and rise of inequality across nations.
  • Train workforce to shift in alternate sectors where machines can’t replace human work and ensure wage parity that will contain the ill effects of automation and retrenchment of labour.
  • Raise awareness about AI and debunk the associated skepticism.
  • Formulate credible data protection law to save private data. For example, the increasing awareness among consumers about the growing number of machine-made decisions using their own personal data has prompted the European Union (EU) to implement the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), designed to ensure the protection of personal data.Store credible data without any racial or cultural bias to ward off any discriminatory result in future.
  • The manner in which AI systems unfold has major implications for society as a whole. Thus need of the hour is to balance innovation with basic human values so as to maximize the gains from this disruptive technology.