from ars technica
Every day, some little piece of logic constructed by very specific bits of artificial intelligence technology makes decisions that affect how you experience the world. It could be the ads that get served up to you on social media or shopping sites, or the facial recognition that unlocks your phone, or the directions you take to get to wherever you’re going. These discreet, unseen decisions are being made largely by algorithms created by machine learning (ML), a segment of artificial intelligence technology that is trained to identify correlation between sets of data and their outcomes. We’ve been hearing in movies and TV for years that computers control the world, but we’ve finally reached the point where the machines are making real autonomous decisions about stuff. Welcome to the future, I guess.
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I was drawn to this article because of the title’s ability to instantly grab my attention. After reading the article, it seems ironic that that is the case, for this article dives into topics like click-bait and online advertising. Initially, when the article discusses how much AI is impacting our lives, I was a bit distraught; I never realized how much artificial intelligence impacts every decision I consciously and subconsciously make. First, when the article went in to how AI impacts how we travel, I realized that back before Google Maps, Waze, or any other GPS-based navigation software was available, most peoples long distance trips involved a lot more planning, and a lot more confusion. In addition, before GPS-based navigation software was available most travels entailed only staying on the main roads and traveling from town to town, yet today, the AI knows every shortcut and backroad to make the trip as time efficient as possible. It just goes to show how much we rely on our AI. The next point in the article I found fascinating was the point about AI and clickbait. The article dove into how companies would keep track of what specific words and phrases would bring in the most viewers/readers, and they have optimized how online titles are generated in order to maximize their viewership. It really makes me wonder if when I go on my phone, am I getting the real information, or just the Information I want to hear? If the ladder, could this be a leading reason in why we as a country, or even a planet, are so divided. It is definitely intriguing.
The article “Is our machine learning? Ars takes a dip into artificial intelligence” by Sean Gallagher begins with the author demonstrating how artificial intelligence has a substantial amount of power and influence over human beings. He cites how artificial intelligence leads humans to make decisions about both minor and major issues every single day. He then goes on to describe how the concept of machine learning- technology being able to problem solve based on algorithms- has allowed technology to become superior to human beings in doing certain tasks. He explains that this is due to technology not having to overcome certain limitations that humans have. However, as Gallagher states, machine learning has its own limitations based on the quality and quantity of data that has been programmed. Therefore, due to the limitations of artificial intelligence technology, Gallagher is trying to determine if machines are indeed learning and will be able to replace many in the workforce.
Personally, I think that due to information he presents in the article and outside information, technological systems are learning and could make human beings obsolete in several workspaces. For example, as a marketing major, assuming I get a job in my desired field, I will have to help a company market themselves well to a certain group of people so they can sell more of a good or service to their desired demographic. However, I believe that due to the advancement of technology, me and other people who intend to work in the field of marketing could struggle to find jobs due to artificial intelligence technology being able to work just as efficiently if not more efficiently than human beings. Thinking from the perspective of a business, it makes sense to rely on artificial intelligence technology rather than humans due to the costs of technology being a fixed cost rather than a variable cost. The fixed cost of artificial intelligence technology presumably would be much lower than the variable cost of human labor in the long run making it more cost-effective to pay for technology than pay for human labor. Therefore, while technology could be great in many ways for economies around the world, due to the heavy ramifications that machines learning could have on the employment rate, it would not be the worst thing in the world if machines were indeed not learning.
The AI industry is a growing industry, which worries many for many reasonable concerns. Although it does help us with daily life, it is also a form of spyware that is not only continuously listening but also grasping what we say and search up.
However looking at it from a labor perspective this could affect many job opportunities because as mentioned in the article AI is much more efficient than the human capability. And AI is already apart of daily life, but the question is whether we want it to takeover our everyday life because we want our life to be “easier”
What we have to do is gather all the potential affects of the AI industry and decide whether this is really what is best for society or not. Because everything has both and good and bad affects.
The article posted basically goes over how artificial intelligence is advancing. ML (Machine Learning) technology is propelling. Algorithms made to examine data make decisions on ads and different things you see on social media and online. The coding analyzes the data presented and applies it to a learning application. Such as the article states, “Summarization: A model extracts the gist of a body of text and creates a summary of it—so, like writing a headline.” In my opinion the technology will advance rapidly and not slow down which is widely agreed upon.
Other websites such as https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/articles/technological-progress-and-potential-future-risks/ explains how technology advancing is not anything unknown. This article states, “The list of new technologies grows everyday. Robots, Augmented Reality, algorithms, and machine-to-machine communications help people with a range of different tasks.” Many jobs are going to be taken over by simple algorithms.
The website https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence further explains how artificial intelligence works and how it is further advancing. It explains how the decision making of these machines will continually advance. Even though they are not acting like humans like in the movies, or have a conscience, these computers will get smarter and influence what we see and do when looking at our phones online and through social media.
Let me give an example gow artificial intelligence makes decisions for us. When we search something on google, for example, if I were to search pants, the ML will remember that. The next time I am online the ads that may pop op will have to do with pants because that is what I recently searched. Now that I am seeing this ad, it may convince me to purchase another pair of pants. This is how artificial intelligence will influence you to spend your money. It checks on the data of what locations you have been in, search history online, hashtags you use on social media and more. The website https://enveritasgroup.com/campfire/why-am-i-seeing-this-ad-how-personalized-ads-work/ shows how personalized ads work.
This article discusses the abilities that machines have over humans, and how machine learning can be/ is used in our everyday life. With the ability to have machines predict outcomes with a little bit of data is something that is very useful in our lives. This was evident in the example with the headlines, where the writer wanted to see what words are involved in headlines that get the most clicks. With this data the writer is able to write a machine learning algorithm to find an patterns that make what people consider a “good” headline. In the simplest form machine learning is teaching an algorithm with a certain set of data, and the algorithm looks for trends in the data and references what it learns to make predictions. This is a concept I have actually been reading about, upon reading this article I was very excited to see what they had to say. It is exactly what I expected, I am personally trying to apply machine learning to basketball in order to predict outcomes of games. This article does a great job laying out the initial steps of trying to find an algorithm that will work with the data. I am still currently looking for one that I want to use for my AI. I also want to implement machine learning in to fantasy football. I want to make a machine that is able to predict how many points each player scores on a given week given who they play and weather conditions. ESPN and Yahoo (The two leading fantasy football apps) have a prediction system that is honestly awful. In my years of doing fantasy football I have seen about 5 predictions actually be correct. My goal is to make an AI that is much more accurate and will give me the edge on my friends. All in all, machine learning is a very interesting concept that data scientist are going to develop.