There’s a war of opinions about Artificial Intelligence - do we want it or do we not? In the backdrop of the Intelligence Revolution, the entire tech world is debating the consequences of artificial intelligence and its part in shaping our future. On one hand, it’s making our lives easier by the day but on the other, the popular pop culture induced fear of AI overthrowing the human race and taking over (or at the very least, replacing us at our jobs) is the flip side of the coin that’s causing concern.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in a nutshell is the deep ability of machines to ‘learn’ user behaviours and preferences. AI is built upon acquiring vast amounts of data that can then be manipulated to determine patterns and insights. AI machines simulate basic human actions and is rooted in the cause of creating technology that can learn and become more human-like. The result of this technology is that today, artificial intelligence performs many tasks better than people can, at essentially zero cost. It can also perform tedious, repetitive work that many people hate to do, also at zero cost.  The concerns raised against being replaced weighted with the benefits of having our lives made easier has caused split opinions on whether we need AI or not. 

But whether we are ready or not, willing or not, AI is already a considerable part of our world. In recent years, artificial intelligence has woven itself into our lives in ways we may not even be aware of.  From morning to night, going about our everyday routines, AI technology drives and controls much of what we do. Artificial Intelligence is such an integral component of our lives that we can’t live without it even if we wanted to - and that’s not a bad thing.  

For example, if you use a smartphone, you are interacting with AI where you know it or not. When we wake, most of us reach for our mobile phone or laptop to start our day. From the second we’ve switched on our devices; we instantly rely on AI functionality without even realising. If you’ve ever asked Siri to send a text or asked Google Assistant a question, then you’ve interacted with one of the most common and obvious forms of artificial intelligence permeating everyday life. Less obviously, think of the times your phone has captured great portrait shots through portrait mode or automatically detected low light and brightened your screen or even how it tracks your sleeping habits and daily steps and shares weekly progress reports; all of which is artificial intelligence at play. 

One of the most obvious use of AI technology is revealed through Google – the search engine that always happens to know what you are looking for. AI makes Google Search one of the most powerful and accurate directory of the web and is possibly one of the truest examples of how AI collects large data to determine patterns based on the user. That’s why Google’s smart search suggestions is already auto completing your question, recommending you a specific part of a video and prompts the exact answer as the top result in a matter of seconds, making it that you rarely have to move to the second page on Google Search. 

AI also shares a big role in prompting tailor made recommendations and ads through social media and other platforms, always curated especially for you. Have you ever spoken about something and had it pop up as a recommendation online in a matter of minutes? Ever searched where to find something and get perfectly curated ads from multiple platforms? From the feeds that you see in your social media timelines to the recommendations you get from Netflix; everything is curated by AI. Artificial intelligence takes all your past behaviour and every web search, interaction, like and save and tailors the experience just for you. With its ability to organize massive amounts of data, recognize images, introduce chatbots and predict shifts in culture, AI is highly valuable to the online industry; not just to curate a feed that’s personal to you, but to also make the apps so addictive that you keep coming back. Advanced machine learning in the future would also prove to be successful in policing fake news and hate speech in real time. 

The bottom line is that machine intelligence is omnipresent in almost everything we do and its interaction in our lives is non-exhaustive. It’s in the simple things like voice commanding your favourite song to play or sending off a quick automatic reply curated from your text contents and in complex mechanisms like robot assisted surgeries and self-driven cars. While there are those that may sound the alarm on our increasing dependence on AI, artificial intelligence has made our lives more efficient every day. Through collating an abundance of data, AI has provided us the ability to establish a true 360- degree view of our everyday life, constantly updated by our changing habits and behaviours. 

Ultimately, the ability of artificial intelligence to learn, process and augment has created a symbiotic relationship between humans and machines.  We cannot live without it, even if we thought we could.