B2 – Upper Intermediate
The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has been preoccupying people from all different walks of life. Whether you’re a scientist, an engineer or a mother of two, questions will always be asked. Is it good? Or does it bring more harm?
Click the link below to read the article about the pros and cons of artificial intelligence.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/pros-cons-artificial-intelligence-mike-fekety
Discussion Questions:
- Talk about all the things you know about AI.
- Talk about its pros and cons.
- In your opinion, what are some of the most worrisome threats associated with AI at the moment? How can we deal with them?
- How prevalent is AI used in your country these days? How about at your job? And in your community?
- How can AI help address some of the world’s most pressing problems?
13 replies on “Pros and Cons of Artificial Intelligence”
1- Talk about all the things you know about AI.
I am a software engineer, so I could speak for hours about AI. Basically, AI is any algorithm that can make decisions. For this reason, we can find AI dating back to the 1960s, for example, in some video games where we could play against the CPU. Since then, Artificial Intelligence has evolved a lot. Nowadays, we can find AI literally everywhere – when you go to the doctor and do a magnetic resonance, when you drive your car, when you use your phone, and many other tasks that we probably didn’t imagine were done with AI.
2- Talk about its pros and cons.
Most interesting AI pros are: Intelligent robots that explore places where a human couldn’t survive, digital assistants that help anybody with some specific task, intelligent algorithms that help scientists make new discoveries. Some of the most dangerous cons of AI are: humans could lose their ability to think due to the absence of need to use it anymore because of AI assistance.
3- In your opinion, what are some of the most worrying threats associated with AI at the moment?
How can we deal with them? In my opinion, there is only one threat with AI at the moment, and it’s that with time, humans could lose their ability to think because of AI assistance and no need to do anything in order to survive in this wild world. To the question of “How can we deal with it?” I really don’t know how to answer. Probably, there will always be people who want to know more and are passionate about science, culture, art, etc. So, they will be the ones who will try to think for themselves.
4- How can AI help address some of the world’s most pressing problems?
I always thought that the only way to grow and leave poverty is learning and applying what you’ve learned. In order to do it, you need to educate as many people as possible. Until now, we couldn’t offer a personalized learning path for everyone. Finally, with AI, it is possible. Imagine an AI assistant that helps with any doubt you have and provides you with a personalized path to learn basically anything and accompanies you on the path of learning.
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– Talk about all the things you know about AI.
AI is when machines can think and learn like humans. It can be used in many areas like smartphones, space exploration and healthcare. AI helps in making decisions quickly, recognizing patterns, and even performing repetitive tasks.
– Talk about its pros and cons.
Pros of AI include fewer errors, improved accuracy, and the ability to do difficult or dangerous jobs. It can also make daily life easier with smart assistants and help in fields like medicine. But the cons include high costs and ethical concerns about making machines too ‘similar’ to humans.
– In your opinion, what are some of the most worrisome threats associated with AI at the moment? How can we deal with them?
One big risk is that people could use AI in bad ways, like spreading false information or making dangerous tools. Another problem is that AI doesn’t have feelings, so it can make choices without thinking about how people feel or what is best for them. To avoid these problems, we need strong rules to control how AI is used and make sure people are involved in decisions that need empathy.
– How prevalent is AI used in your country these days? How about at your job? And in your community?
AI is used more and more in my country, especially in banking, customer service and healthcare. At my job, we use it to improve user experiences and make some tasks faster.
– How can AI help address some of the world’s most pressing problems?
AI can help with big problems like climate change by studying data and finding better ways to use energy. It can also help doctors find illnesses faster and treat patients better.
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1.Talk about all the things you know about AI.
AI is branch of computer science that focus on developing human intelligence in machines. These systems are capable of learning from experience, adapting to new inputs, and performing tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and language translation.
2.Talk about its pros and cons
Cons:
Job Displacement: The automation of tasks by AI can lead to job displacement, particularly in industries that rely heavily on manual labor. This can result in economic and social challenges.
Privacy: The use of AI often involves the collection and analysis of large amounts of personal data, raising concerns about privacy and data security.
Ethical and Moral Issues: The development and deployment of AI raise ethical and moral questions, such as the potential for AI to be used in harmful ways or the implications of creating machines that can make autonomous decisions and ultimately endanger the human species.
Pros
Efficiency and Automation: AI can automate repetitive tasks, leading to increased efficiency and productivity.
Accuracy and Precision: AI systems can perform tasks with high accuracy and precision.
Data Analysis: AI can process and analyse vast amounts of data quickly.
Availability: Unlike humans, AI machines systems can operate continuously without the need for breaks.
3. In your opinion, what are some of the most worrisome threats associated with AI at the moment? How can we deal with them?
Job Displacement: The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) could bring significant changes in various industries. One effective solution is reteaching human workers, to learn new skills.
4. How prevalent is AI used in your country these days? How about at your job? And in your community?
AI is commonly used in smartphones, driving automation, automate repetitive tasks, translate document, understand other languages, etc.
5. How can AI help address some of the world’s most pressing problems?
One of world’s most pressing problems is environmental sustainability. AI can help optimize energy usage and reduce waste, optimize water consumption, monitoring and protect wildlife and nature.
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* Observe parallelism in a series.
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1. How would you define artificial intelligence?
It is the intelligence of machines, the way human being are designing machines that can think, even feel (in the future) like them.
2. Is AI a threat to the human race as we know it? Is there a danger that AI will take over the world?
For the moment, I really don’t thing that it is the most important risk. But they are other risks that could be damagable for the human : if they become dependant of the robot making all the jobs and tasks, there could be human unemployment, lazyness and risk of loosing our thinking, multitasking and intuitive abilities. That could be rather dangerous and potentialy robots could become stronger / powerful than human.
3. Should we be making AI that behave like humans?
First of all that is impossible (for the moment). Because there are still différences between humans of robots : feeling (hapiness, sadness, care, solidarity, etc.) are not qualities that could be learnt by the robots.
Secondly, that would not be ethic : that would mean create slaves at our image. Like a kind of exploitation / taking advantage of them.
4. AI is and could be powerful. Should we have a campaign to stop the killer robots?
Yes, I think they are too dangerous and they make the war easy to be decided by the government. Very often in the old times, the number of injured or murdered people was decisive in the ceasefire. With an army of robot, there would be no end except in case of general breakdown….
5. Will the robot army rise up and steal our jobs?
It is a possibility. But the worse would be that human would be unemployed and will loose their ability / agitlity to work, to adapt to change, to think and propose evolution, etc. That would mean an attrition in our creativity skills.
6. Can AI help address some of the world’s most pressing problems, or will it worsen issues such as inequality and poverty?
Well and fairly used, AI could be a wonderful way of discharging human from hard tasks and give them the time and the opportunity to increase their knowledge, develop their creativity to find solution to keep the world liveable for all. If only…
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1. How would you define artificial intelligence?
I think it is a tool that will help us more and more in the future but it still has its limitations today.
2. Is AI a threat to the human race as we know it? Is there a danger that AI will take over the world?
I don’t believe in that kind of theories, where AI ends up controlling the world. My biggest fear about this is that it will be cheaper to buy a robot than to pay a person’s salary and that in the long run, it will put people out of work.
3. Should we be making AI that behave like humans?
I don’t think so, I think this is the perfect opportunity to rid humans of their biggest flaws. I don’t think it is a good thing to make an AI lazy, hungry or envious.
4. AI is and could be powerful. Should we have a campaign to stop the killer robots?
I don’t believe in that, I don’t think it is possible. I would like to think that we will be intelligent enough not to create such robots.
5. Will the robot army rise up and steal our jobs?
I don’t think so, it sounds like something out of a science fiction movie.
6. Can AI help address some of the world’s most pressing problems, or will it worsen issues such as inequality and poverty?
I think these problems are too complex even for an AI to solve, but I do think they could help us with them.
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1. How would you define artificial intelligence?
Machines used for analyzing tons of data and building predictive models to make decisions.
2. Is AI a threat to the human race as we know it? Is there a danger that AI will take over the world?
Of course it is. The more we rely on it, the more decision we put in machine´s hands, the less control we will have over important things such as medicine, agriculture, mental health, privacy, military institutions, etc.
3. Should we be making AI that behave like humans?
There will always be a difference, a threshold that i don´t know if we will be able to cross. But no we shouldn´t.
4. AI is and could be powerful. Should we have a campaign to stop the killer robots?
No campaign necesarry yet!
5. Will the robot army rise up and steal our jobs?
More and more.
6. Can AI help address some of the world’s most pressing problems, or will it worsen issues such as inequality and poverty?
I believe it can be used to that service, it´s up to us, if we want to implement the sollutions ai can bring in this fields.
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1. How would you define artificial intelligence?
I will define it as the way human see the human conscience.
2. Is AI a threat to the human race as we know it? Is there a danger that AI will take over the world?
I don´t think so.
3. Should we be making AI that behave like humans?
We can try it but, AI will never behave 100% linke humans.
4. AI is and could be powerful. Should we have a campaign to stop the killer robots?
Yes, killing is a horrible act we cannot take away that “human part´´ we can’t mechanize that horrible act, because if we do it we will start to see it as something non-human.
5. Will the robot army rise up and steal our jobs?
Since the industrial revolution, jobs have been robotized, for example in assembly lines.
6. Can AI help address some of the world’s most pressing problems, or will it worsen issues such as inequality and poverty?
Inequality an poverty are human problems due to the comprehensiveness of the human being. Poverty is a problem that could be solved by better distribution of resources and paying decent wages in third world countries. The inequality will be solve if we take ours egos away.