How will artificial intelligence impact the immediate future of society?

Mechanization and automation of processes have brought about important social changes throughout history. For example, during the first half of the 20th century, the mechanization of agricultural work caused massive migrations from the countryside to cities across Europe, which transformed into a fundamentally urban society. Artificial intelligence (AI) will allow the automation of a wide variety of complex processes that currently still require human intervention.

There are numerous examples and different forecasts about the extent and when this automation will be achieved: autonomous driving, real-time machine translation, or assistance robotics, among many others.

To achieve new levels of automation and autonomy in decision making, artificial intelligence must advance in solving major scientific challenges such as the following:

Augmented Cognitive abilities: Artificial intelligence will be located in a future social context, coexisting and interacting with humans and other artificial intelligence, with sensors and actuators located in our homes and cities. It is essential that AI systems are able to build correct models of all these actors so that they can reasonably understand and foresee their intentions and actions. AI must also be able to become predictable, in order to achieve the desired collective behavior rapidly.

Machine learning is the key to solving this challenge and must develop algorithms that manage to learn from small data sets, just like humans do, eliminating the current need for huge amounts of data.

Developed human-machine interaction: When AI is used for decision-making, it is critical that humans understand why and how these decisions are made. And for AI to generate these explanations, the integration between symbolic models based on logical formalisms with non-symbolic learning systems needs to be improved. This integration is very poor today. We have to move forward in the semantic modeling of problems and the understanding of social pragmatism and common sense. Advancing in explainability and improving the interaction between people and AI is a major challenge.

Improved verifiability of the software: As in any automation process, humans, and society in general, demand guarantees in the behavior of the systems and in the results they obtain. This implies that the systems have to be verified to demonstrate that their behavior conforms to the requirements, as has traditionally been done with the software. Since artificial intelligence will intervene in decision processes that will affect the well-being of the population, it is also crucial that we can verify that these decisions are in accordance with the values and principles that we share as a society, such as security, privacy, justice, and several others. Likewise, eliminating or detecting biases in the use of data is key to guarantee respect for non-discrimination.

Artificial intelligence can be an opportunity to improve our societies if we clearly inform about the consequences of the application of this technology and we make the legislatures establish satisfactory redistribution of wealth laws for all (taxes on robots, universal minimum wage, etc.). The education of society in the use of technology is key to forming critically conscious citizens who can decide the direction in the use of this technology. For example, automation of agricultural, manufacturing, or transportation tasks will eliminate jobs and create others. The bottom line in this process will clearly go in the direction of reducing the need for time spent at work to meet basic needs. This phenomenon has always been related to automation processes. If we compare the working conditions of the 19th and those of the 21st century, we see that the working day has been reduced from 12 hours a day, with practically no rest, to 35 hours a week.

Artificial intelligence can be the catalyst for new, profound, and positive changes in employment and labor relations, in the misplacement of work centers and, in general, an improvement in living conditions. But, to ensure that these effects are positive, we need critically-minded citizens to get involved in the process and demand proper management of benefits from public authorities.

Finally, these challenges require a multidisciplinary work that involves technologists and experts in social sciences.

The article has been written by Dr. Raul V. Rodriguez,

He can be reached on LinkedIn.