Skip main navigation

New offer! Get 30% off your first 2 months of Unlimited Monthly. Start your subscription for just £35.99 £24.99. New subscribers only T&Cs apply

Find out more

The benefits of AI

In this step, Mark Elshaw summarises some of the main benefits that can be delivered through AI.
12
I think in terms of the most benefits of AI I see in terms of medical systems I think we can use intelligent agents to advise doctors, to advise patients, to try and coach people so they have got a better health conditions. In terms of autonomous cars, it’s going to be a massive area, of course its hopefully going to reduce accidents and make people’s lives more simple. Of course, autonomous cars they need a lot of artificial intelligence there so we don’t want to ruse into the concepts of these autonomous cars because they can be really dangerous but we need to make sure they can recognise objects correctly, they can recognise pedestrians. They know the concept of speed.
60.4
Things that human beings take for granted and we all need to create an AI version of that. Body enhancements, I know humans are very interested in this, the idea of if we can put chips into people, we can have better access to the internet rather than us having to type everything and get it on a screen it can be fed directly into your brain. But of course, there’s issues with that as its not always what information we want. How do we process the information?
91
The beautiful thing about human beings is that we have an attention system that can you know, I’m interested in where my car keys are so I only focus on my car keys, I don’t, so if we’re getting loads and loads of information from the web straight into our brain how are we going to filter this information. So that needs to be controlled but of course enhancements you know, people with disabilities, robot skeletons are becoming more and more useful. Of course, we could see robotics as an enhancement of people’s systems because it can help them, it can assist them in activities to do so. I mean AI is going to have a massive affect.
129.8
I think in the short term its going to replace a lot of mundane boring activities that human beings are forced to do in their jobs, you know, like waiters and fetching things off shelves and its going to make available a lot of time to do more interesting things and of course there’s the data analysis side, you know, the big data, we create more and more data every day and we are going to analyse that and make things better for people. So, produce drugs, product better lifestyles all based on what people have done. There’s a lot of biological and psychological activity about you know, changing people’s behaviour so we eat better, we exercise better.
175
So, maybe if we analyse a lot of data about a person we can determine what their trigger is to make people behave and life more healthier lifestyles which is going to be better for them, they’re going to live longer and less pain and things like that but also its going to be more productive for society because of the less need for healthcare systems and things like that.

In this video, Mark Elshaw lists what he considers to be the biggest benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) for humanity.

We’ll look at some of them in greater detail as we move further through this program:

  • Medicines
  • Autonomous cars
  • Body enhancements
  • Employment

One thing it’s important to bear in mind, however, is that it’s become a marketing term which often confuses digital transformation with AI technologies.

Here are some examples of phenomena that are often falsely conflated with AI:

  • Transforming business processes from paper-based to digital is about maximising efficiency not AI
  • Applying machine learning to business operations relating to data collection might provide some insights, but again, is not AI

Your task

Which of the benefits of AI mentioned by Mark Elshaw do you consider to be the most important and why?
This article is from the free online

Artificial Intelligence: Distinguishing Between Fact and Fiction

Created by
FutureLearn - Learning For Life

Reach your personal and professional goals

Unlock access to hundreds of expert online courses and degrees from top universities and educators to gain accredited qualifications and professional CV-building certificates.

Join over 18 million learners to launch, switch or build upon your career, all at your own pace, across a wide range of topic areas.

Start Learning now