Artificial Intelligence (AI): A Threat or a Blessing

In recent years, artificial intelligence has woven itself into our daily lives in ways we may not even be aware of. It has become so pervasive that many remain unaware of both its impact and our reliance upon it. From morning to night, going about our everyday routines, AI technology drives much of what we do. When we wake, many of us reach for our mobile phone or laptop to start our day. Doing so has become automatic, and integral to how we function in terms of our decision-making, planning and information-seeking.

AI is integrated in our personal and professional online lives today, which raises the question, what exactly is it? Artificial Intelligence aka AI is the ability of a machine to mimic humanlike behaviour such as learning, processing, and adapting. An AI powered machine processes the provided data to predict outputs for new values. AI systems can adapt their behaviour to a certain degree by processing their previous results and actions automatically. The term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ was coined in 1956, by John McCarthy. But since then, AI has become a powerful tool and resource today due to the massive volumes of data, advanced computing technology and algorithms to process such data.

Fateen Ajaz Naqash - Grade 11B1 - GEMS Millennium School, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

Natural language processing aka NLP which is implemented in voice assistants, chatbots. Computer Vision or CV has a great potential and is used in facial recognition technology. AI is being utilized in the healthcare industry to identify tumors and other diseases while even providing healthcare workers with a proper detailed analysis of the possible treatment. ChatGPT reflects the most recent advancement of AI. It is a chatbot based on a deep learning algorithm designed to process cumulated and unstructured data.

Unfortunately, there are some potential issues when it comes to using AI. Unemployment is a serious problem that has risen due to AI replacing jobs that that are currently done by humans. Additionally, AI may be biased or make decisions that are not in humans’ best interests. For example, an AI system may favor a specific gender or a race in a search result for example because of the data it might be trained on.

Overall, AI comes with its own benefits and downsides. It is our responsibility to use it for learning and creating. As said by Stephen Hawking, “AI is likely to be either the best or worst thing to happen to humanity”.