HOW AI CAN HELP HUMANITY
Healthcare and medicine
Far from the usual science-fiction vision of AI replacing us, the tech can and will help us to live longer, healthier lives, assuming enough of us trust it sufficiently. The obvious role of AI in this field overlaps with every other area in which AI excels: it can mine vast data sets (in this case, medical records, research results, medical scans and so on) to ascertain scenarios for best practice when it comes to disease prevention, diagnosis, treatment and medication.
As any medical professional will tell you, much of their time is spent on keeping records and other important but time-consuming paperwork: AI can take care of at least some of those tasks. It can also assist with medical research by performing laborious tasks that would usually take researchers months if not years; for example, DeepMind’s AlphaFold AI predicts protein structures, which will hopefully speed up drug discovery. In disease diagnosis, a study has found that AI trained on scan data is just as good as – and in some cases, better than – human doctors at analysing X-rays.
At the user end, chatbots can communicate with patients and other stakeholders, taking care of some of the more routine discussions that need to take place in healthcare, although most of us would agree that a human doctor with a genuine bedside manner would be preferable.
Climate and the environment
Monitoring and predicting climate patterns used to be a job done by people in raincoats at remote weather stations – but no longer. AI can keep tabs on the weather and temperatures, whether locally or globally, and use that data to tell us where the climate is going and what strategies to deploy as a result: an essential job nowadays for obvious reasons. It can also use pattern detection to forewarn us about impending extreme meteorological or seismological events, helping us to be prepared. This in turn is applicable to the everyday management of agriculture and its corollaries, food security and the protection of vital supply chains.
Beyond weather, other environmental challenges – such as pollution levels, melting icebergs and deforestation rates – can also be monitored more easily with AI. For example, The Ocean Cleanup uses AI to help create detailed maps of plastic pollution in remote ocean areas, which the organisation can then target for removal. This sort of analysis is very time-consuming for human researchers, so AI can hopefully free up time for us to focus on developing better solutions to these issues.
Education
As we write these words, the UK government is debating whether to let teachers use AI for marking students’ work, composing letters to parents and other routine tasks as a time-saver, an obvious route to take given that so many teachers are exhausted, out of time and in short supply. The bigger picture that is yet to be discussed in depth is that AI, used correctly of course, can be used to design and deliver entire curricula and individual lessons, in written or spoken form, that can be personalised to complement each pupil’s learning style and pace.
AI-delivered education will most likely be cheaper and more portable than the original human variant, allowing improved education opportunities in sectors in the UK and worldwide where it is needed most. Human management will be required at all stages to ensure that goals are met and correct processes followed, of course: we’re not blindly suggesting that AI should simply replace teaching professionals.
The urban landscape
It’s probably 100 years too late to completely fix the chaotic hellscape of sprawling metropolises such as London, Shanghai, Mexico City and the world’s other giant conurbations, but AI can certainly help out quite a bit when it comes to optimising traffic flow, rerouting commuters, suggesting ways to mitigate pollution and so on. When it comes to designing bolt-on suburbs for those cities or planning entirely new towns and cities elsewhere, though, AI-powered apps will be indispensable, as they can mine data sets of transport patterns, journey times, supply chains, pollution reduction and so on. This data will be even more useful when self-driving cars become more common on our roads, enabling them to safely navigate busy streets and take the best routes based on real-time data.
It’s not so much that AI is particularly suited for urban design: it’s more that cities generate masses of data that can be analysed and put to good use. With that data, and the ability to parse it, AI can improve on current practices and help make things more efficient. As always, it should be used in conjunction with human management: these are, after all, our living spaces that we’re talking about.
Preparing for disasters
You can’t prevent natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions or other calamities like famines or pandemics, but you can certainly prepare for them. AI can and does simulate various catastrophic events and their necessary responses, giving us at least a degree of preparedness when (not if) these tragic events occur. The tech can identify where and when people are most vulnerable to a disaster, indicating when an evacuation is needed ahead of time and minimising the loss of lives and property.
Resource allocation and optimisation can take place, too, meaning that the supplies that affected people need in these scenarios can be planned for. Fortunately, weather information from satellites and reports from seismological tools have been building up for decades, giving the AI tools huge data sets to work from. This is where the technology can actually save lives, so assuming it’s managed wisely, we’re all safer and more prepared for difficult times ahead.
Online safety
It’s perhaps ironic that AI, which should correctly be treated with caution when it comes to data privacy, can also be an enormous help when it comes to cybersecurity. Automated fraud detection, identity verification and tracking of electronic footprints are all examples of how AI can block or identify evildoers and protect the rest of us, once again because it can read, analyse and collate data faster and more efficiently than its human counterparts. Ever had a credit card stolen and used by some random villain to buy stuff online? It’s likely to be an AI-powered tool that will spot the transaction, match it against other activities and prevent the fraud from taking place. What we hope is that this kind of crime will reduce in quantity as AI becomes more efficient and more integral to online activities, although the wiles of the cyber-criminal underworld currently appear to be matching it step by step. Go, AI