The Positive And Negative Impacts Of Autonomous Robots On Society, Essay.

We live in a world where the future can potentially mean that we have to rethink how we work, rest and play. Discuss how the development of autonomous robots will change our live positively and negatively.

Smarter weather prediction and agriculture

In the present world, it has become almost next to impossible for an average human to accomplish their day-to-day operations minus the use of technology at some point. Indeed, the rapid progress of information technology over the years has been inclined towards getting solutions and convenience. In this regard, technology is being used to make work easier as well as help humanity with innovation offering solutions that could not have been possible without this option. Nevertheless, there is a growing notion that the society is transitioning into a “robot society” (Makridakis, 2017, p.51). Recent studies by Casares (2018, p.7) shows that the inexorable increase in robot as the fundamental shift in developed economies is likely to transform the nature of work as well as opportunity within society. Certainly, the robot has apparently become a spectre threat to the economic security not only to the working poor but also the middle class across mature societies (Torresen, 2018, p.75). Technology is taking almost each aspect of life hence this comes with negative impacts. The integration between technology and human beings create risks such as replacement of jobs done by human by robots, health related ailments because of addition to computer gaming. This paper investigate how the development of autonomous robots will transform the future of society both positively and negative.

Artificial intelligence has brought impressive applications with remarkable benefits for all in several ways. To begin with the advancements in autonomous robots has led to smarter weather prediction and agriculture. Research has shown that accurate prediction of weather can be difficult to challenging and difficult with errors which are likely to hurt businesses, endanger lives particularly for people who lack the ability to promptly seek shelter and when need arise and disrupt travel. Nonetheless, the birth of artificial intelligence gives solutions by analysing data and making future predictions. In accordance to the American Meteorological Society (AMS), artificial intelligence has been a game changer in prediction of weather (Tzounis, Katsoulas, Bartzanas, and Kittas, 2017, p.33). As a result, AI has drastically improved real-time decision making which has significantly impacted weather. In this sense, smarter weather prediction through AI will enable weather professionals to predict more accurately natural disasters such as floods, tsunamis, hurricanes as well as earthquakes early enough to allow precautious measure to be undertaken to avoid losing lives and property by unexpected natural calamities (Tzounis, Katsoulas, Bartzanas, and Kittas, 2017, p.31). On the same note, artificial intelligence has also started being utilised toward more sustainable agriculture. Thus, the use of such powerful software will help to optimise crop yield, thus, individuals will be able to reduce the required space minus resorting to deleterious techniques such as pesticides.

Artificial intelligence in healthcare

The advent of artificial intelligence in healthcare is expected to transform the health industry. The use of AI as well as machine learning will gradually change the approach to medicine and the future of healthcare. According to Phaneuf (2019) machine learning has the potential to offer data-driven clinical decision support (CDS) to medical professionals in addition to infirmary staff, which sis paving way for heightened revenue potential. Machine learning which is a subset of artificial intelligence helps in identifying patterns, algorithm uses as well as providing automated insights to healthcare givers. A report by the Business Insider Intelligence shows that researchers from the University of North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Centre utilised IBM Watson’s Genomic product to identify specific treatments for more than 1000 individuals (Jiang et al., 2019, p.231). Watson Genomic product was able to perform big data analysis in determining treatment options for persons with tumours who were found to have genetic abnormalities. Relatively, Application Programming Interface (API) of Google Cloud Healthcare such as Clinical decision support (CDS) is providing additional artificial intelligence solutions that assists medical practitioners in making highly informed clinical decisions about patients (Zang, Zhang, Di, and Zhu, 2015, p.144). The Google Cloud artificial intelligence acquire data from patient’s electronic health records via machine learning to create insights for medical providers to make enhanced clinical decisions.

The integration of artificial intelligence in the healthcare setting enable for a range of benefits such as task automation and analysing big patient data sets to deliver improved healthcare quickly and at an affordable cost. Recent studies has shown that approximately 30% of healthcare expenses are related to administrative practices. With the advent of AI in healthcare it can automate a number of these tasks such as follow-up on bills that have not been paid, pre-authorising insurance, and maintenance of medical records to ease the workload of healthcare practitioners to ultimately save money spent by healthcare facility on these services (Ahuja, 2019). With AI’s ability to analyse big data sets it will be possible to pull together patient insight leading to predictive analysis to discover major areas in the healthcare environment that require improvement.

Currently, work in the industrial environment is performed by robots which range from metal forging, semiconductors, plastic processing and automobiles. Since the industrial setting consists of highly repetitive operations, this has made it possible for robotics to work effectively, especially in dangerous working environment that human beings cannot survive. In this regard, robots play a key role in industrial work. As a result, autonomous robots will keep on improving the quality and consistency of industrial works. The advancement of 3D printing robots in addition to the industrial internet of things (IIoT), industrial robots have the capability to offer enhanced production quality as well as precise and dependable processes. In addition to that, there is reduced real-time monitoring and well as cycle times which helps to better preventive maintenance. The use of industrial robotics will result to maximum throughput and productivity because it increases the speed of manufacturing process. At the same time, robots do not get tired like humans hence they can operate 24/7, this speed is greatly dependable and ultimately reduces the cycle time hence maximising throughput (Lee et al., 2018, p.21).

Industrial work and automation

Autonomous robots allows for greater safety. Since most of the operations within the industry are repetitive using robots minimises risks of injury for workers particularly where manufacturing occurs under hostile states. The use of robots enable the supervisor oversee the manufacturing process from remote locations or online. Similarly, use of robotics in manufacturing will reduce direct labour expenses. The costs associated with having human beings handling numerous manufacturing operations is more costly as compared to use of robots. In this regard, this will free the workers to allow them channel their skills as well as expertise in other business areas like programming, engineering and maintenance.

Although, artificial intelligence and robotics have brought a lot of transformation to society in almost every field of work, it also has its negative side. Many researchers, and scholars fear that autonomous robots are likely to cause much harm than good in future. In regard to the manner in which automation is rapidly changing the way people do business is an indicator of several genitive impacts that could be brought about by robots emergence in the place of work. For instance, researchers are raising concerns that the use of robots in the workplace will increase risk related to data breaches among other cybersecurity problems. Virgillito (2017, p.240) assert that substituting conventional employees with software applications that can be accessed wirelessly could lead to increased data breach related risks. Improved automation does not come without risk hence businesses that use smart-devices as well as computer controlled equipment to run their operations in most cases they are attractive targets by cybercriminals. Consequently, with the automation of almost all business operations there is a possibility that the future society will be faced by increased cases of data breach. Certainly, data breach will expose sensitive personal data to the public which will mean that they will be no privacy, which is highly dangerous. This means that the right to privacy is under threat

The use of autonomous robots is feared to reduce employment opportunities. While there are job that will be created by artificial intelligence, more jobs will be lost in the process particularly jobs with repetitive tasks. In this sense, it means that more people will be rendered jobless losing their jobs to robotics. Any job that features repetitive tasks as part of its duty will be at risk of being substituted by autonomous robots in future. For instance, a research by Dasoriya, Rajpopat, Jamar, and Maurya (2018, p.459) has predicted that in the United States the net jobs that would be created by artificial intelligence will be approximately 500,000 while those jobs that would be lost in the process is approximated to be 1.2 million. It is evident that the use of artificial intelligence in the workplace will be a threat to future job opportunities.

Cybersecurity concerns

Artificial intelligence is only tasked with making decision based on the program commands. Consequently, this is a major threat that the society is faced with artificial intelligence due to its decision-making mechanism. A robot is therefore only as intelligent as well as insightful like the person responsible for its initial programming, which means that there is likely to have some biasness within the robots mechanisms particularly when it comes to making critical decisions. For example, in 2014 in the United States an active shooter circumstance forced individuals to call for Uber to escape the area. However, instead of acknowledging the dangerous condition, the Uber algorithm used noted an increase in demand and decided to increase the price (Dasoriya, Rajpopat, Jamar, and Maurya, 2018, p.461). In this sense, instead of recognising the danger faced by the people with their lives at risk the Uber made the decision according to the programmer decision, hence such condition puts the lives of people at high risk.

Since almost all jobs are being replaced by robots, there is a threat of improvement in creativity. Artificial intelligence lack creativity due to lack of physical interaction with challenges in the workplace to challenge individual’s creativity. Robots are only programmed to perform creative tasks, thus sat the point where the creativity is stalled in the development of artificial intelligence would mean that the creativity will stop from there. The present artificial intelligence match the creativity of the creator (Makridakis, 2017, p.47). Consequently, due to lack of creativity, there could be a tendency to lack empathy. Certainly, it means that the decisions made by an autonomous robot are built in the best possible analytical solutions that happens to be. However, this may not always be the correct decision to make.

The use of artificial intelligence is likely to be a threat in future because it lacks improvement. An autonomous robot do not have the ability to change its reaction to a specific condition like a human being would do. For instance, a human being will immediately remove their hand on a hot surface once they get burned. Nonetheless, for an artificial intelligence it does not need to change its responses, perceptions and reactions when there is a change in environment. The robot does have the ability to differentiate certain bits of information observed past the data produced by that directed observation (Arlitsch, and Newell, 2017, p.790). Therefore, in case there is a change in how an operation should be undertaken the robot may not realise this change but will only work based on the initial algorithm, hence artificial intelligence does not support improvement. Hence the use of robotics is likely to halt further improvements in terms of how operations are performed because the tasks done by conventional humans are being replaced by robots.

Loss of employment opportunities

There is fear that artificial intelligence can be inaccurate. Generally, machine translations shave become a critical instrument in peoples quest to communicate with each other. However, the only challenge is that these machines translations should be reviewed by human beings since the intent of the words is what is translated by the machines. Therefore, without a review by a specialised human translator, could result in the information received from the machine translation could be inaccurate or even insensitive resulting in more problems instead of reducing them making matters worse by complicating the overall communication.

With the progress in artificial intelligence it is likely to change the power structure of societies. Artificial intelligence has the capability to transform industries as well as the manner in which individual live in different ways. As a result, the society is likely to experience a shift in power when artificial intelligence becomes a dominant force (Zang, Zhang, Di, and Zhu, 2015, p. 143). In this regard, there is fear that those individuals who create and control this artificial intelligence technology are likely to be the ones to steer society toward their individual vision regarding how individuals should be. In addition, this could also remove the humanity out of certain decisions such as the concept to have autonomous artificial intelligence responsible for warfare minus human actions to initiate violent acts.

Artificial intelligence is likely to treat humanity like a commodity. In regard to the present outcomes of robotics and artificial intelligence there is an argument regarding the number of individuals that benefits compared to the number of people that do not benefit? The threat in this regard is that individuals are taken like a commodity (Casares, 2018, p.8). For example, organisations are already doing this by considering the commodity of automation using AI as an excellent investment unlike the commodity of human workforce. Therefore, once people themselves start to perceive themselves as a commodity, it is undoubtable that AI will also do the same and the outcome of such decisions cannot be predicted.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the concept of artificial intelligence comprise both positive as well as negative impacts. As a result, there is need to come up with ethical standards and policies that will be used in developing the robotics to ensure that only tasks that endanger human life should be handled by autonomous robots.

References

Ahuja, A.S., 2019. The impact of artificial intelligence in medicine on the future role of the physician. PeerJ, 7, p.e7702.

Arlitsch, K. and Newell, B., 2017. Thriving in the age of accelerations: a brief look at the societal effects of artificial Intelligence and the opportunities for libraries. Journal of Library Administration, 57(7), pp.789-798.

Casares, A.P., 2018. The brain of the future and the viability of democratic governance: The role of artificial intelligence, cognitive machines, and viable systems. Futures, 103, pp.5-16.

Dasoriya, R., Rajpopat, J., Jamar, R. and Maurya, M., 2018, January. The Uncertain future of artificial intelligence. In 2018 8th International conference on cloud computing, data science & engineering (confluence) (pp. 458-461). IEEE.

Jiang, F., Jiang, Y., Zhi, H., Dong, Y., Li, H., Ma, S., Wang, Y., Dong, Q., Shen, H. and Wang, Y., 2017. Artificial intelligence in healthcare: past, present and future. Stroke and vascular neurology, 2(4), pp.230-243.

Lee, M., Yun, J., Pyka, A., Won, D., Kodama, F., Schiuma, G., Park, H., Jeon, J., Park, K., Jung, K. and Yan, M.R., 2018. How to respond to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or the Second Information Technology Revolution? Dynamic new combinations between technology, market, and society through open innovation. Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity, 4(3), p.21.

Makridakis, S., 2017. The forthcoming Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution: Its impact on society and firms. Futures, 90, pp.46-60.

Makridakis, S., 2017. The forthcoming Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution: Its impact on society and firms. Futures, 90, pp.46-60.

Phaneuf, A. 2019. AI and machine learning are changing our approach to medicine and the future of healthcare (GOOGL, IBM). [online] Available at: https://www.pulselive.co.ke/bi/tech/ai-and-machine-learning-are-changing-our-approach-to-medicine-and-the-future-of/2j9rc55 [Accessed 28 Oct. 2019]. 

Torresen, J., 2018. A review of future and ethical perspectives of robotics and AI. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 4, p.75.

Tzounis, A., Katsoulas, N., Bartzanas, T. and Kittas, C., 2017. Internet of Things in agriculture, recent advances and future challenges. Biosystems Engineering, 164, pp.31-48.

Virgillito, M.E., 2017. Rise of the robots: technology and the threat of a jobless future. Labor History, 58(2), pp.240-242.

Zang, Y., Zhang, F., Di, C.A. and Zhu, D., 2015. Advances of flexible pressure sensors toward artificial intelligence and health care applications. Materials Horizons, 2(2), pp.140-156.