What is AI?

AI or Artificial Intelligence is in your everyday life, from a text recommendation to chatbots, AI is everywhere. Artificial intelligence isn’t just a fantasy; it’s real, and more people are using it every day. Which begs the question: are we using artificial intelligence, or is it using us?

How does Artificial Intelligence work? While it’s quite simple, it’s quite smart. Artificial intelligence is programmed with one mission in mind, to be able to learn from humans. So you got a new haircut and turned on your phone and unlocked your phone with your face. The AI will learn, and it will update Face ID data.

AI is everywhere without you even knowing it. Let’s say you’re looking for a light bulb for your bathroom and you decide not to buy it. The next day, you’re looking at YouTube, and you come across a video called “The Best Light Bulbs.” Transport has also been affected by AI, like self-driving cars and finding the best route on Google Maps.

AI is also helping people every day—for example, in the medical sector, they use AI to find cancer and diseases. Labour has also improved, as fewer people have to do boring tasks like vacuum cleaning and lawn mowing. As well as these examples, there are so many ways that AI is helping us.

But people have concerns about AI. AI takes up a huge amount of your personal data, which means big brands can look at your data whenever they want. AI is also taking people’s jobs. For example, CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity platform for businesses, fired 5% of the employees equal to around 500 workers and many more companies are following.

Now the question is, what will AI bring to our future? To be honest, no one knows for sure, but AI is getting smarter every day, and as AI evolves, it will make our lives better or worse. Elon Musk once said, “AI is likely to be either the best or worst thing to happen to humanity.”

By Guy Harkness