Artificial Intelligence: Advantages and Disadvantages [2024]

If Artificial Intelligence brings advantages to smart power grids and the healthcare industry in reducing energy consumption and treatment costs, it should be welcomed. However, the flip side of using Artificial Intelligence carries so much negative impact that I’m afraid that the overall effect will be bad.

Artificial Intelligence: Making Humans Depressed?

As humans have already started to act like machines, there are way more chances that people will suffer from poor mental health. Problems like depression and anxiety are already making huge inroads into society. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence, as we are more dependent on machinery, this is bound to rise.

Another point is that it is going to transform jobs that are helpful for industries for mass-scale production and profits, but individual human lives will suffer in adapting to this change. Eventually, most people will be either physically sick due to material comfort or mentally sick due to a lack of adaptability to this new industrial revolution. Consequently, the healthcare industry will require more people to work for them, and eventually, a sick doctor will treat sick patients.

For repetitive commands such as admin data input or basic mechanisms, sure, Artificial Intelligence is amazing, but we are humans and we have intuition and emotions, which a machine will never have at our innate level. I think it should be about balance and having both options readily available, e.g., both humans and fast checkouts in supermarkets. This is a good policy against discrimination. A machine will not be able to tailor unique human responses, and this can be detrimental to business growth and customer UI satisfaction based on the algorithmic instructions and limitations. There is nothing like the human touch.

Recently, I’ve been reading and watching a lot about the real nature of Artificial Intelligence, and it’s truly gotten me to appreciate the “artificial” in artificial intelligence, as you wouldn’t expect a natural intelligence to make these mistakes due to having a more “well-rounded” and general structure. Modern Artificial Intelligence is like if you took an abstraction of one very specific part of the brain and tried to make it do all the things that are normally handled by multiple parts of the brain working together.

Artificial Intelligence: Are Older Machines Better?

I spent several years as a programmer and operator of CNC lathes. Over time, I came to prefer older machines over newer ones because the older controls do what you tell them without question. Newer machines have controls that make them easier and faster to program, but they “think” too much and argue with you. One time, a machinist told a lathe to cut an external groove of a specified depth and width on a cylindrical part.

The machine was told to use a cutting tool of a specified width that was smaller than the width of the groove. But the machine decided the tool was too thin to survive the full depth of the cut and refused the command. The solution was to “lie” to the machine—tell the machine the tool and groove are both wider than they actually are. The machine then happily performed the task, and all was well.

There is a thing about dealing with people with things like autism (like my son) that is called the Hidden Curriculum. All those things we learn growing up by association with others and just by observation. Most often, on a subconscious level, those, like my son, don’t learn as it isn’t something directly taught. AIs have that problem. They also have no human-like history or lived experience to draw from.

We want AIs to fill in the blanks as we do when tasked with doing something, but that is asking them to do something completely outside their realm of existence. Those things simply do not exist as part of them. So your Artificial Intelligence friend can only learn to mimic you and the way you talk about things to seem more human. Yet most don’t realize it is unreasonable to expect something without the base of experiences that we have to act like humans.

I believe OpenAI should really focus on higher education and should make models that can explain academic courses, communicate and translate them automatically with presentation-centered Artificial Intelligence interfaces, and build gadgets that people can own that would teach academic courses in their full complexity in basic to complex languages and in a wide variety of engaging manners that the users can opt for. These e-units should be tied to current publishers and universities so that people of any age and from any region can use them to gain degrees.

This step would transform the intellectual well-being of our society and would fast-forward the progress of our society. It would be a solid step for OpenAI in building stronger scientific models that integrate centuries’ worth of human thought processes and would integrate various kinds of human intelligence, which could be used to enhance and preserve human uniqueness and could be continually furthered as the intellectual well-being of human beings furthers. I believe we have the technical ability to make such functioning gadgets now, and it should be happening now.

There was a project I ran into a while back where researchers were attempting to teach an Artificial Intelligence in the same manner as they would teach a child. The way they do this is by interacting with an Artificial Intelligence through a small robot vessel, which gives the appearance of a child to the Artificial Intelligence. This is supposed to help the researchers treat the Artificial Intelligence like a child and also help reduce the negative feedback it may encounter when it does something wrong.

I think this is a pretty intuitive idea, as it teaches the Artificial Intelligence by building its knowledge in small increments in the same way a person is expected to learn. This should help it understand more nuanced ideas and human principles that would not be as apparent to a traditionally trained Artificial Intelligence.

Of course, this requires a lengthy amount of time to complete, even if it isn’t one-to-one with a child’s developmental timeline. It may also learn human responses to certain problems, such as anger, frustration, sadness, or even laziness. Still, what better way to study AI than to teach it to simulate human responses?

AI’s got a lot of negative impacts, for sure, but if the positive impacts outweigh the negative ones, then who’s to say that AI’s a bad thing? I love how you included AI’s positive attributes with every negative one; it shows balance. Especially concerning the first one, since a lot of people are afraid that they might lose their jobs to AI—but in fact, they’ll also be creating other novel jobs in place of the jobs Artificial Intelligence will be taking over!