Artificial intelligence is a hot topic in business and industry as it continues to help us improve efficiency and productivity. Automation and machine learning have been changing the game for years by this point, and yet we still don’t really know exactly where it all ends.

All we know for certain is that AI is already all around us in our daily lives in some form or another, whether you’re asking Alexa to play your favorite song or trusting your home heating system to adjust the temperature accordingly. Wearable tech is helping improve our health, while self-driving cars are simply waiting on appropriate regulation from law makers. You can dine out at restaurants and be served by a robot waiter, while human artists have new AI-powered contemporaries creating works that rival their own for quality but in a fraction of the time.

What is interesting for many of us, though ominous for some, is that the AI of today is only just getting started. Right now, it is clunky and somewhat crude in its execution, but it is constantly evolving and improving, and we don’t yet know exactly how far it can go.

We’re almost pretty certain that we won’t be getting taken over by a supreme AI overlord who deems humans unnecessary for survival any time very soon, but the possibilities for AI applications keep on expanding as the tech improves.

Here we look at how AI is already all around us and where it will be going soon, as well as address some of the fears and concerns around privacy and security.

AI Medical Advances

One of the most immediately beneficial impacts of AI technology is in medicine and healthcare. Wearable systems can monitor patients and identify issues earlier than they would otherwise be, as well as track the activity patterns of vulnerable people such as the elderly living alone. There are privacy concerns here, of course, and we’ll discuss those further into the article, but the technology is already here to better combat the likes of dementia, poor nutrition and sleeping disorders.

AI is also helping to discover new drugs, and even played a big role in helping scientists focus their efforts to develop Covid-19 vaccines during the pandemic.

Fears, Concerns and the Future

Unfortunately, unpleasant people have already started using AI for nefarious purposes, as evidenced with some unsettling and offensive deep fake videos. Other major concerns are privacy and security, as the technology needs data to learn patterns and make decisions, which means monitoring our activities. The strategy at the moment is to develop methods for gathering data without humans being able to access it or discover ways to encrypt data so it cannot be hacked.

As for the future of AI, things are already heating up as it is now being used to write software, which could eventually be a huge game changer in the field if literally, anyone can create software by simply inputting their requirements into an AI system.

It is also possible that AI will soon be able to develop even more complex artificial intelligence all by itself, and where it goes from there will be interesting to say the least.