In recent times, Artificial Intelligence has become more prominent in our everyday lives. With the emergence of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, which are able to answer questions and assist with tasks such as writing essays, our everyday lives have become much easier and more efficient. While AI has the potential to bring about numerous positive changes in society, it can also bring about risks and negative impacts, and could completely change the way in which society functions in the future.

AI has enabled us to collect, process and analyse large amounts of data at a faster rate than ever before. This has led to greater efficiency in many industries, and has increased accuracy in many fields, such as in the healthcare sector. As a result, once dangerous tasks such as surgeries and operations have been much safer and easier to carry out    , making labour intensive healthcare jobs much more manageable. By automating mundane and risky activities, AI frees up tasks better suited for the human workforce, such as tasks involving empathy and creativity. As a result, not only has AI increased labour productivity and efficiency, but it has also increased job satisfaction and overall worker happiness.

AI also has the potential to greatly improve the education sector. Personalised learning tools such as Duolingo and Quizlet are able to analyse student learning styles, as well as their strengths and weaknesses, and this can be used to provide personalised learning experiences in order to benefit students individually. Furthermore, AI can assist teachers with tasks such as grading assignments and tests. As a result, teacher workloads would decrease, allowing them more time to provide personalised, detailed feedback to students. With an improved education system, the future labour force would be more skilled, allowing for a further increase in labour productivity, which would help stimulate economic growth and improve standards of living for individuals in many different countries.

AI-powered technologies can also help make our everyday lives easier and more convenient. Many social media platforms such as YouTube and Spotify use algorithms in order to maximise user engagement. Algorithms provide users with additional content based on each individual’s interests, making it easier for individuals to find content best suited for their needs. Earlier this year the emergence of AI chatbots, the most famous being OpenAI’s ChatGPT, have made researching and completing written tasks much easier and more efficient. These chatbots can generate paragraphs of text based on a prompt, and are able to scan millions of different websites in order to increase the accuracy and reliability of the response. Using these tools, individuals are now able to write important emails and essays in minutes, making what were once time consuming tasks into something that can be generated with the click of a button.

However, despite the several benefits that Artificial Intelligence has had in recent times, there are some downsides. Similarly to the Industrial Revolution, many jobs are likely to be replaced by AI in the near future. According to PwC, ‘ 7 million existing jobs will be replaced by AI in the UK from 2017-2037.’ Consequently, unemployment rates in the UK and in other developed countries will rise significantly in the next 10 years. Due to the evolution of the workforce due to AI, governments will be forced to change training and education programmes in order to help our future workforce transition to new positions requiring human capabilities such as creativity. Many current workers may find it difficult to transition to jobs requiring a completely different skill set, and could potentially cause a further increase in unemployment in the near future. Due to an increase in unemployment, workers will have less wage bargaining power, and might experience decreases in wages due to the increase in competitiveness for jobs. On the other hand, businesses and firms would benefit from the increased productivity due to AI, allowing them to maximise profits. This would cause increased income inequality, and could potentially lead to poverty, decreased life expectancy, and access to healthcare and education for many.

Since AI was created by humans, it is not free from bias. If AI algorithms are built with a bias or the data in the training sets they are given to learn from are biased, they will produce results that are biased. This could lead to various consequences, an example being Microsoft’s Twitter chatbot that became racist. In March 2016, Microsoft released a Twitter chatbot, which aimed to ‘engage people through casual and playful conversation.’ However, many people started tweeting the bot with racist comments and remarks, causing the chatbot to repeat these phrases to other users in just under a day. Various different biases within Artificial Intelligence could result in reduced reliability, lower customer service experiences and reduced sales and revenues for firms, due to the spreading of false information to humans.

However, AI is in its primitive stages, and has not yet been developed to its full capability. According to futurist and engineer Ray Kurzweil, artificial intelligence will achieve human-level capability by 2030. By 2030, AI will be an essential component of day-to-day company operations, and will even be able to assist humans with creative tasks and ideas. Companies such as Tesla have recently begun to utilise AI with driving, and by 2030, completely autonomous vehicles might be fully operational in some parts of the world within the next decade. As useful as it is now, AI will become a much larger part of our everyday lives in the not so distant future, as it continues to become increasingly sophisticated and complex.