Over the last year you can’t move for hearing about AI.
It’s prompting debates about the future of work, creative rights, fair practices; it touches the media, policing, government…. And it’s becoming as ubiquitous as online banking, QR codes, chip-and-pin and contactless – technologies that have inched their way into our lives and become second nature.
AI suddenly seems poised to make the same leap. It’s something we all need to know about.
But like many you may have heard the term but wondered: What exactly is it? And what do you really need to know to understand it?
Voilà our Queenagers’ Guide to AI. In this article you’ll find everything you need to know about AI to understand it and why it’s becoming so important. You’ll even learn ways that you can use AI in your daily life and how it could affect your career or job.
What is AI technology and how does it work?
First of all, ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is a rubbishly misleading label. ‘AI’ generally refers to programmes, products and instances where machines and softwares perform tasks we would more typically associate with human intelligence. These tasks include classifying, automating, optimising, forecasting, recommending, perceiving and learning.
It’s important to hold onto one simple thought. Most AIs solve very specific problems or complete very specific tasks.
For example, if the task is to learn how to recognise what a tree is, you would need to provide vast numbers of inputs to help the machine understand the various elements that make up a tree. But imagine for a moment you exposed an expert tree-recognising machine to, say, a flower. Or a blade of grass. Or a hedge. Or some weeds or bushes or other plants.
The machine would not be able to say, “A-ha! That’s a flower.” Because it has not been taught or trained how to recognise a flower. It takes thousands or even millions of pieces of data to train a machine to learn even one simple task.
AI has its limitations because of the amount of information it needs. But once it’s analysed enough data, it can work faster and more effectively than humans to complete the specific task it has been trained to do.
AI doesn’t need to sleep, or rest, or eat. It never wakes up in a bad mood, and it doesn’t have money worries, health concerns or caring challenges. It never forgets what it’s learned. And with every new learning, it can become ever more accurate. It’s solving just one problem.
The facts about artificial intelligence, or AI
- AI isn’t anything new. It’s been around since the 1950s
- Recently there’s been a big boom in ‘generative AI’ – known as GenAI. The ‘Gen’ bit is short for ‘generative’ which means the code is working to generate something brand new from a range of existing content. It’s new. It’s scary. It’s brilliant. And it brings enormous challenges around IP, privacy, deep fakes and ethics
- Back in November 2022 when ChatGPT launched, it broke all records and secured a million users in the first 5 days. It’s the fastest growing consumer app in history. The “chat” bit of its name refers to the way you interact with a computer, where you pop in your requests or questions as if you are chatting to it
- This is what people mean when they talk about chatbots. You “chat” with the robot and set it tasks or ask it questions. The “GPT” bit is an abbreviation for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer”. It’s a bit of a mouthful. “Generative” means making something new from existing inputs. “Pre-trained” refers to use of loads of inputs to train the model, giving it vast scope for invention and an enormous store of data and information to create viable answers for the questioner. “Transformer” refers to the underlying architecture – a deep learning model which connects all the dots at speed and delivers remarkable outputs. ChatGPT and other large language models are taking the world by storm.
Disadvantages of AI
A big issue with AI is that it is only as good as the data it’s fed.
There’s a saying in coding: Rubbish in, rubbish out. Like if we bake a cake with rotten eggs, it might well look like a cake but it won’t be something you’d want to eat.
And therein lies the catch. It’s hard to know if you can trust the accuracy of an AI because so much depends on the human inputs that shape what goes into it.
Machines don’t have feelings, they have code. They don’t have beliefs, they have algorithms. Their objectives are all programmed. How they behave is directly affected by the biases of the people behind them.
Sometimes you hear worries about machines becoming more intelligent than human beings and destroying humanity. Hello, Cyberdyne from The Terminator.
It’s clear the far greater threat is AI being created or used irresponsibly by humans.
How AI is responsibly and ethically harnessed is down to us.
Why AI is suddenly everywhere right now
In 1999, Bill Gates said, “…We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next 2 years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10.”
Just think back to the early ’90s. In 1992, only 10 websites existed on the world wide web. Pages took months to build, and only academic type organisations – the sort of people dealing with nuclear and particle physics, for example – were on there.
During our lifetimes, technology has got more powerful, more sophisticated and more useful. For AI, the game changer has been two-fold.
The first is the availability of data.
The second is computing power.
The major breakthrough in AI came when Graphic Processing Units suddenly boomed into a Second Life. You might have heard these referred to in the media as “GPUs”.
They were originally developed for video gaming and graphics editing and happened to be designed to perform the very operations AI requires – arrays of linked processors operating (in parallel) to supercharge their speed. These GPUs were exponentially faster than previous hardware used for AI – and also significantly cheaper.
Suddenly, ever faster, ever cheaper computer chips made the hardware needed for AI democratically available. Which also explains why companies like Nvidia have incredible stock valuations these days and have taken over Tesla as the most popular stock traded by retail investors.
How does AI work?
So how does AI work? The way I like to think about it is if computing power is AI’s engine, data is its fuel. Without the data, the engine can’t really go anywhere or do anything. I can’t emphasise enough that the quality and quantity of that data really, really matters.
But it’s not just data. You also need algorithms. If we stick with the idea of the engine and the fuel – algorithms are the design of the engine. Algorithms are the instructions that solve a problem or accomplish a task and tell the engine what to do.
The debates surrounding the ethics, governance, legislation and standards for AI are raging around the world. Something we’ll come back to in a future article…
Is AI a good thing?
AI is forever changing how to work and do business. You will already be very familiar with recommendations when you buy something on Amazon or eBay, and the personalisations you can get with your video and music streaming services. Everything from search engines to voice recognition services are making their mark.
Beyond this, AI has the potential to advance humanity by augmenting our skills, talents and abilities, allowing us to do things faster, better, and more efficiently. This goes for the things we do for work, for fun and in our endeavour to solve the world’s most pressing global challenges. Just a few examples:
In education: AI can be trained to automatically correct and grade tests. This frees up teachers to spend more time with individual children and focus on teaching, not marking.
In medical science: An AI model can analyse thousands of brain scans and predict tumours faster and with greater accuracy than the best radiologists and cancer doctors in the world. This means treatments can be fast tracked and doctors can spend more time treating tumours rather than looking for them.
In A&E settings: Here, success is dependent on prioritisation. What you do and when you do it can mean the difference between life and death. And since AI, unlike us humans, is never limited by distractions, hunger, lack of sleep or stress – it can take on more complex analytical assignments, allowing doctors and nurses to focus on treating and interacting with patients.
Will AI take our jobs?
According research by Goldman Sachs, AI could replace 300 million full-time positions – about a quarter of work tasks in the US and Europe. It also predicted new employment opportunities and a 7% boost in goods and services globally.
Look at the examples above: They aren’t robots taking our jobs. They’re helping make life better – by allowing human beings to devote their time and energy and focus on the things they can do that machines simply cannot.
Think for a moment about all the satellite imagery, live data streams relating to weather, maps and historical data which could provide inputs into forecasting, planning and predicting weather-related events. AI can be a brilliant predictions tool.
AI can often be a helpful tool to speed up analytics and optimisations and help us make better and more informed decisions in businesses and organisations, so-called “data-driven decisions”.
I particularly love examples where AI translates or transcribes audio or voice into written text, or the other way around. It’s a wonderful example of opening up more opportunity for all.
My answer: AI will never replace all human jobs, but it will – and already is – affecting some industries more quickly than others. If an assignment can be broken down into processes that are easy to repeat, the probability of it being automated by AI is higher.
What are the new jobs in AI?
Midlife (and Noon) is all about new opportunities and the ways we want to pivot into new things. For Queenagers, the good news is AI will create new jobs by augmenting the skills and abilities of human beings. AI can open access to professions that traditionally were closed to many by simplifying high skills tasks into lower skillsets.
Naturally it will create jobs for software engineers who write the code and algorithms, the people who oversee quality control. But it also creates opportunities for people who shape how AI is integrated into companies, how it influences strategy, how employees and senior leaders use it effectively and how businesses train employees to use it.
If history has any lesson, it’s that the economy can adapt. Electricity put candle makers out of business and the internet transformed commerce … and job growth has kept up with not only these changes but also population growth. Jobs using, deploying, prompting or working with AI will be as prolific as AI itself.
Could your next step be into the exciting world of AI?
Professor Kerensa Jennings is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
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Thanks so much for this easy to understand AI article. I’ve used ChatGPT but never really understood what exactly was happening or how algorithms and AI fit together.
It appears to me that the experience of us Queenagers – with our life experience and soft skills – will be incredibly important to integrating AI into businesses, working practices and workforce.
Great piece!