CCU: Lesson - The Impact of AI on Society

The Impact of AI on Society

Think About It...

As we begin our next lesson, ask yourself a question:

  • Have you ever watched a movie or TV show that involved AI? 
    • Was the AI portrayed as a positive or negative thing?

The interior of a futuristic car. In the center of the image are the words "Self-Driving"

Positive Impacts of AI

AI technologies are already making a big difference in our everyday lives and different parts of society like healthcare, business, and the things we use every day. Let's look at a few examples of AI’s societal impacts (most of these focus on the positives):

  • Doing Tasks Automatically: AI can do a lot of routine and repetitive tasks on its own. This means people have more time to do more interesting and creative things at work. It can make work faster, reduce mistakes, and save money for businesses.
  • Better Healthcare: AI is helping to make healthcare more efficient and effective. Machines and computer programs with AI can find diseases early, make personalized plans for treatment, and even discover new medicines. AI also helps keep an eye on patients from far away and can make diagnoses faster and more accurately, which can save lives.
  • Helping Customers: Have you ever chatted with a computer instead of a person online? That's probably AI! Computers with AI can talk to you and help you with problems 24/7. They can also look at what you like and don't like to make suggestions that you might like.
  • Fun Filters: On social media, there are filters that use AI to add cool stuff to your pictures, like bunny ears or funny costumes. While these filters are fun, some can make people feel bad about themselves (creating a negative self-image), especially the ones that change how you look.
  • Recognizing Faces: AI is also good at recognizing faces. It helps us unlock our phones and tag our friends in photos. It's even used for security at events. However, some people worry about their privacy and the safety of their information when using these face recognition tools.

Negative Impacts of AI

Most of the points above focused on ways AI improves our lives. However, you may have noticed some of those positives come with potential downsides.

Even though AI is undeniably helpful, it's important to know that there can be some negative impacts too. Let's look at a few:

  • AI can affect how we feel about ourselves.
    • As in our example involving filters, some people end up with a negative self-image because they can't live up to their AI generated self.
  • AI affects our privacy and the safety of our information.
    • To produce the positive impacts, AI often requires access to personal and private information. Because of this, your personal or private information can be exposed in unwanted ways.
  • AI could potentially replace human labor
    • As much positive as there is in AI handling routine tasks, those tasks had previously been performed by humans who were paid for their work. Finding new ways to employ people with AI taking on these more menial tasks will be critical to our society.

As we keep using and making new AI technologies, we need to be aware about both the possible positive and negative societal impacts and endeavor to ensure appropriate use.

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