11.1 Impacts of AI

AI has many extraordinarily positive benefits for Humans

The impact of AI in the next few years on the global environment, economics, society, and individuals is complex and highly unpredictable at the detailed functional and operational levels. 

Initially, there will be a tremendous surge in the need for Humans with knowledge and skills in the emerging unlimited applications of AI, as explained in ‘Appendix 9 – AI Jobs, AI Applications, and AI Tools’. 

The initial period of a few years involving the deployment of AI applications across the world will create enormous opportunities for value creation among Big Tech corporations, and to a lesser extent, the closely associated general population of Humans across the world. There are many potential ways in which AI can really help Humans [110].

Taking an optimistic perspective of AI, rather than the much more globally common pessimistic perspective, some of the potential early stage positive impacts of AI at a high level may include:

Global Environment

• AI can help monitor and mitigate climate change by providing accurate weather forecasting, optimizing energy usage, analyzing environmental information, and facilitating the rapid adoption of zero emission energy sources. Climate change is one of the largest risks to all life on Earth this century and is an extremely difficult problem to solve [45], however AI may prove to be the most beneficial technology in helping Humans to rapidly correct the excess levels of CO2 and CH4 in the Earth's atmosphere and oceans.

• When AI is fully applied to level 5 autonomous vehicles across all modes of transport, this will reduce the number of total vehicles required worldwide while also drastically increasing and massively optimizing every vehicle's utilization. Autonomous vehicles will also reduce the number and severity of collisions and associated road deaths and injuries dramatically. It will also produce totally uninterrupted traffic flows, improve fueling/charging of vehicles, optimize loading and unloading of freight movements, and therefore reduce total global carbon emissions and massively improve global air quality.

• The global demand for energy resources is increasing every year in direct proportion to global population growth. As the world moves to renewable energy and electricity to replace fossil fuels, there will be growth in demand for specialized material resources such as critical minerals that require extensive mining and refining operations, and could have a growing negative impact on the global environment. However, the development and expansion of AI technologies may assist leading energy resource scientists and engineers with developing entirely new and vastly better renewable green energy resources that can also have a much less detrimental impact on the Earth overall.  The future of global energy generation with the assistance of AI is extremely exciting. 

Economics

• • • There will actually be many millions of entirely new jobs created through the arrival of AI, that were never possible before it arrived. AI will create new Human job opportunities in rapidly emerging fields such as information analysis, AI prompting, AI training, AI development, AI computer systems, industrial automation across entirely new industries, business automation across entirely new industries, general robotics, and emerging computer technologies. It is absolutely certain that nearly every industry in the world will be radically improved with AI, by far, and billions of Humans will be needed to achieve that !

    • The implementation of AI in all of the various industries will increase innovation, increase productivity, reduce costs, and improve efficiency, potentially leading to broader wealth creation and total economic growth.

    • AI will significantly impact the current global Human job market in relation to trained skills and experience, as AI enabled technologies and mass automation begin to replace many Human jobs and task that were previously unachievable due to Hard Limits of typical Computer information processing technologies. This is already creating a new category of fear for skilled workers: AI Anxiety [84]. However, the advancements of AI will certainly create many millions of new types of jobs, so if assertively positive steps are taken to support Humans who have lost work, it is possible to train and re-skill workers for the new roles that AI will create. 

Society

• AI will improve Human healthcare outcomes by enabling exceptionally more accurate and much earlier disease detection and diagnosis, combined with vastly more focused and personalized treatment plans tailored to individually specific Human profiles.

• It has been demonstrated many times over the years that when the law breaks down and cannot be enforced in any location, Humans will invariably suffer brutal crimes and often die. The law and law enforcement are the critical central structural pillars of a well functioning, safe, healthy, modern civilized society. AI can help improve Human safety by providing more powerful information analytics for detecting and predicting patterns of criminal behavior and enabling Human law enforcement to use this to intervene and prevent crimes or limit their severity. It is quite possible that in the future there will be AI powered police supporting existing law enforcement officers. We may even eventually see fully automated 'Robocops' patrolling the streets, warning particularly dangerous criminals: “Dead or alive, you’re coming with me”.

• There might be very serious concerns about expanding ethics, control, and privacy implications of AI, particularly in terms of Human related information privacy, bias, discrimination, and individual Human social controls such as fully AI automated social credit systems. However, there are already new AI regulation laws being discussed by many leading governments that are aimed to protect most modern western societies and civilized democracies against such draconian 'Big Brother' societal management systems and totally unreasonable inequities.

Individuals

• AI can improve Humans daily lives by providing personalized recommendations, assisting with menial tasks and chores, and radically improving accessibility, interaction and communication for Humans across all socioeconomic levels of global society, and providing incredibly new and exciting levels of assistive support for people with a wide range of disabilities.

• AI will be able to better warn and protect individuals against actions that could lead to a loss of privacy, and the guard against the potential of being intentionally hacked by rogue actors and having their personal information misused.

AI regulation can control the upside benefits and downside risks

The impact of AI will depend on how it is developed, implemented, and regulated. It is critical for governments around the world, working with various thought leaders in AI and its impacts, to carefully consider the many fantastic current and future potential benefits of AI, and to work towards responsible and ethical AI development and deployment to wholly regulate and control all of the serious downside risks. 

THIS CAN BE DONE ! 

It is critical that this work is aggressively pursued in a globally coordinated way right now, as the development of AI is certainly going to be exponential, and Humans must work collaboratively in order to keep it under Human control while there is still a small amount of time available.