Daily News Analysis

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

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Why in the news?

The number of organisations adopting AI technology in India has gone up by 2.5 times with widespread applications in education, health, finance, mobility and e-commerce among others.

 

What is AI?

AI is the intelligence of a machine to work based on human cognitive skills that has the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize or learn from past experience, do problem solving, perception and using language.

 

Types of AI learning:

Supervised Learning

Reinforced Learning

Unsupervised Learning / Predictive learning

Guide machine by providing sample inputs and desired outputs.

 

Eg: Speech recognition

       Driverless Cars

       Face Recognition

       Classifying emails as spam & non-spam

Learning data gives feedback to the system and evaluates its performance based on it and reacts accordingly.

 

Eg:Chess master algorithm

There is no data fed for learning with descriptions or labels

 

 

Subsets of AI

Machine Learning

Deep Learning

Adaptive Learning

  • It learns from data and then applies it to make informed decisions.
  • Eg: Recommendations in music list will be based on listeners preference comparing other listeners with similar musical taste.
  • Continuously analyze data with a logical structure artificial neural networks.
  • Eg : Google's AlphaGo
  •  To coordinate interaction with the learners and deliver customize resources and learning activities.
  • Eg: Prodigy math helps to build 1st to 8th grade math skills

 

Applications of AI:

Education

Healthcare

Environment

  • Tutoring customize support and instruction
  • Grading using answer key and compile data on performance compared to others
  • Immediate feedback to students
  • Assistive Technology - helping read out passages for visually impaired student
  • School facilities management- Wi-Fi water supply etc.,
  • Exam integrity and Plagiarism detection
  • DeepMind's AlphaFold has solved the protein-folding problem, Drug discovery especially for rare diseases.
  • Robotic Synthesiser can read a research paper and make the compound described in it.
  • Better & early decision making.

Eg: Google to predict risk of Heart Attack by scanning retina.

  • Checking health through wearables.

Eg: Fitbit, iWatch, can calculate calories burned & sleeping pattern.

  • Robot aided surgeon with an automated speech enabling device.
  • UNEP's World Environment situation room uses AI to obtain real time sensor data of 140 countries to predict Co2 concentration Glacier mass, sea level rise, biodiversity loss, etc.,
  • AI warning systems to detect and notify authorities of algal blooms in freshwater.
  • Clean environment - robots picks up waste soda cans in buildings.
  • AI-learn and predict weather patterns Eg: IPCC relays on 30 climatological models generated by AI to study large scale climate changes across the planet

Energy

Entertainment

Space

  • Smart power consumption by consumers.

Eg: smart electrical meters.

  • Help energy companies to discover faults before they lead to energy failures by maintaining Ideal maintenance schedules by analysing data.
  • AI helps Oil companies to identify exactly where to drill using IOT sensors.
  • Anticipate energy demand reducing required output reserves for the company.
  • Large language models like chat GPT is used to create text music and art with excellence.
  • Personalisation of content.

Eg: Netflix, spotify

  • Movie production-   Automate sound production procedures.
  • Subtitles generation.
  • Gaming and sports industry along with virtual reality(VR) and augmented reality(AR).
  • Metadata tagging- classify items based on the characteristics and tag them→ used by media content creators.
  • Helps process satellite data for big data analytics
  • Assists Navigation system
  • Monitor satellite health- equipment malfunctions/ satellite collisions.
  • Assists astronauts

Eg: Feder(Russia) sent to space to assist astronauts in ISS for 10 days.

  • Clean debris in space

Eg: Chaser (ESA) to be sent in 2025 to clean orbital debris.

 

Benefits of AI:

  1. Reduction in human error
  2. Take risk instead of humans

Eg: DAKSH- developed by DRDO to identify and dismantle land mines.

  1. Available 24/7

Eg: Chatbots.

  1. Help in doing repetitive jobs 

Eg: Banking robot Lakshmi can verify documents in banks

  1. Faster decisions making

Eg: chess game in windows

  1. Daily applications

Eg: Siri, Google assistant

  1. New inventions jobs

Eg: Prediction of breast cancer

  1. New AI technologies create entirely new jobs

Eg: Prompt Engineering- New profession

  1. Helps in democratization of Knowledge - AI helps in better visualization, effective communication and compiling known facts to all.

 

Concerns with AI:

  1. Creates unemployment in unskilled and semi-skilled category.

World Economic Forum: By 2025, machines will displace 85 million jobs even as they create 97 million new jobs

  1. Intrinsic biases of AI creator can underrepresent minority views or take decisions against values of certain communities based on race, caste, religion, etc.,
  2. AI can perpetuate inequality in the society and promote concentration of wealth because of AI-divide, more intensive than digital divide.
  3. Can demoralize creative talents as recognition to them drops.

Eg: Gofundme Campaign was held to protect artists from AI technology.

  1. Ethical concerns - Responsible use, fairness and misuse of AI.

 

What can be done?

  1. Restructure our education system and traditional career trajectories to acquire expertise.
  2. Governments should form Advisory groups to formulate AI & data governance policy guidelines for responsible use of AI.
  3. Companies should incorporate AI Code of conduct.
  4. Restrict AI from using human pronouns such as 'I', to prevent AI's identity to be mistaken as human and cause false sense of reality among users.

Eg: Google's AI technology that auto completes words in Gmail doesn't predict pronouns, to avoid exposing any unconscious gender biases in the model.

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